Eclipse Season

Lunations, underlined

A solar eclipse is a New Moon that happens to fall near a lunar node — close enough that the Moon crosses the Sun’s face. A lunar eclipse is the same alignment at the Full Moon, when the Earth’s shadow crosses the Moon. Astrologically they are read as supercharged lunations: beginnings and culminations with a longer reach, traditionally unfolding over the following six months and sometimes lighting an axis of the chart for a year or more.

The old counsel around eclipse weeks is temperance: let events arrive rather than forcing them, expect doors to open and close with unusual decisiveness, and keep notes. The nodes hold one pair of signs for about a year and a half, so the seasons within that span rhyme with each other — and beneath that, each eclipse belongs to a Saros family whose members return on a far longer rhythm of roughly eighteen years, which is why an eclipse can echo one from nearly two decades before.

Eclipses come in pairs (occasionally threes), two seasons a year, moving slowly backward through the zodiac along the nodal axis. Each season therefore emphasises one pair of opposite signs — and one pair of opposite houses in your chart. Lunar eclipses range from total, through partial, to the subtle penumbral kind, when the Moon crosses only the Earth’s outer shadow — barely visible to the eye, listed here because the alignment is real and the calendar should be complete.