The Evening Sky in August 2026
Venus is the ‘evening star’, appearing in the west soon after sunset (or before, if you know where to look.) It sets around 9:30 pm at the beginning of the month and 10 pm at the end, a brilliant object in the dark sky. The crescent Moon will be close to Venus on the 16th. Around 3:30 pm the pair will be due north midway up the sky. Venus will be 2½°, five Moon diameters, to the right of the Moon. Once you locate the Moon in the sky, Venus will be obvious.
Though brilliant, Venus is rather boring in a telescope. It looks like a small first-quarter Moon. It is covered in dense white clouds so shows no features at all. Venus is catching up on us from the far side of the Sun and is now at its greatest angle from the Sun. Through September and October it will slip lower in the evening sky as it moves between us and the Sun.
Bright stars are widely scattered over the sky. Vega on the north skyline is balanced by Canopus low in the south. Canopus twinkles with all colours as its white light is broken up by the air. So does Vega but, being fainter, it's not so obvious. Vega sets in the northwest around midnight while Canopus swings up into the southeast sky. Canopus is the second brightest true star. (Sirius, the brightest star, is in the morning sky.) Orange Arcturus is in the northwest, twinkling red and green as it sets. Arcturus is the fourth-brightest star in the sky and the brightest north of the equator. Vega is the fifth brightest of all the stars and the second brightest north of the equator.
North of the zenith is orange Antares, marking the body of Scorpius. The Scorpion's tail hooks around the zenith like a back-to-front question mark. Antares and the tail make the 'fish-hook of Maui' in Māori star lore. Antares is a red giant star: 600 light-years* away and 19 000 times brighter than the sun. Below or right of the Scorpion's tail is 'the teapot' made by the brightest stars of Sagittarius. It is upside down in our southern hemisphere view.
Midway down the southwest sky 'The Pointers ', Beta and Alpha Centauri, point down and rightward to Crux the Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri is the third brightest star in the sky (planets not counted) and the closest of the naked-eye stars, 4.3 light-years away. Beta Centauri, like most of the stars in Crux, is a blue-giant star hundreds of light years away and thousands of times brighter than the sun.
The Milky Way is brightest and broadest overhead in Scorpius and Sagittarius. In a dark sky it can be traced down past the Pointers and Crux into the southwest. To the northeast it passes Altair, meeting the skyline right of Vega. The Milky Way is our edgewise view of the galaxy, the pancake of billions of stars of which the sun is just one. The thick hub of the galaxy, 27,000 light years away, is in Sagittarius. The actual centre is hidden by dust clouds in space. The nearer dust clouds appear as gaps and slots in the Milky Way. Binoculars show many clusters of stars and some glowing gas clouds in the Milky Way. The Large and Small Clouds of Magellan LMC and SMC look like two misty patches of light low in the south, easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They are galaxies like our Milky Way but much smaller. The LMC is about 160 000 light years away; the SMC about 200 000 light years away.
Saturn rises due east around 11 p.m. at the beginning of the month and around 8:50 at the end (so isn’t on the chart.) It looks like a medium-bright star with a cream tint, all on its own.
At the end of the month golden Jupiter is rising an hour before the Sun, so might be seen in the dawn twilight from places with a low eastern skyline.
On the 28th the rising full moon might look a little odd. It has just emerged from the dark centre of Earth’s shadow, the umbra, and is moving out of the shadow’s fuzzy edge, the penumbra. It leaves the penumbra just after 7 pm.
*A light year (l.y.) is the distance that light travels in one year: nearly 10 million million km or 10^13 km. Sunlight takes eight minutes to get here; moonlight about one second. Sunlight reaches Neptune, the outermost major planet, in four hours. It takes four years for sunlight to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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