The Evening Sky in October 2026
At the beginning of the month brilliant Venus is the ‘evening star’ appearing in the western sky soon after sunset and setting at 10:30 NZDT. The thin crescent Moon will be beside Venus on the 12th. Venus sinks into the twilight as it moves between us and the Sun. By the 22nd it is setting 30 minutes after the Sun. After passing between us and the Sun on the 24th, Venus pops up in the eastern dawn sky. By the end of the month it is rising 50 minutes before the Sun. In a telescope, and higher-magnification binoculars, Venus appears as a tall thin crescent.
Mercury continues its best evening sky appearance of the year for much of October. At the beginning of the month it appears as a medium-bright star directly below Venus, setting around 9:40. Around the 8th it will be to the right of Venus. After that it will be above and right of Venus. The Moon will be above Mercury on the 13th. Around mid-month Mercury starts to sink into the twilight as it begins to pass between us and the Sun. It will also fade as more of its sunlit side is turned away from us. On the 20th it is setting two hours after the Sun. By the 30th it is much fainter and setting an hour after the Sun.
Saturn appears in the eastern sky in the evening and is due north around midnight. It looks like a lone, medium-bright star with a cream tint. A small telescope will show the ring and Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, looking like a faint star close to the planet. Larger telescopes might show two or three fainter moons closer in than Titan. The full moon will be near Saturn on the 24th.
The brightest true stars are low in the north and south. Canopus is low in the southeast at dusk, often twinkling colourfully. It swings up into the eastern sky during the night. On the north skyline is Vega, setting in the early evening. Places in the north of Aotearoa NZ will see Deneb near the north skyline in the middle of the Milky Way. Deneb is the brightest star in the cross-shaped constellation of Cygnus the swan. Orange Antares is midway down the western sky. It marks the body of Scorpius. The Scorpion's tail loops up the sky, making a back-to-front question mark with Antares being the dot. Above and right of the Scorpion's tail is 'the teapot' made by the brightest stars of Sagittarius, upside down in our southern hemisphere view.
In the southwest are 'The Pointers ', Beta and Alpha Centauri, making a vertical pair. They point down to Crux the Southern Cross. Alpha Centauri, the top Pointer, is the closest naked eye star at 4.3 light-years* away. Beta Centauri is a blue-giant star, very hot and very luminous, hundreds of light-years away.
The Milky Way is brightest and broadest in Scorpius and Sagittarius. In a dark sky it can be traced down to the south. In the north it meets 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, with a black hole four million times the sun's mass, is hidden by dust clouds in space. Its direction is a little outside the Teapot's spout. The dust clouds appear as gaps and slots in the Milky Way. A scan along the Milky Way with binoculars shows many clusters of stars and some glowing clouds of left-over gas. There are many in Scorpius and Sagittarius and in the Carina region below Crux.
The Large and Small Clouds of Magellan, LMC and SMC, look like two misty patches of light in the southeast sky above Canopus. They are easily seen by eye on a dark moonless night. They are galaxies like our Milky Way but much smaller. The LMC is around 160 000 l.y. away; the SMC around 200 000 l.y. away.
On moonless evenings in a dark rural sky the Zodiacal Light is visible in the west. It looks like late twilight: a faint broad column of light enclosing Venus and Mercury and reaching up toward Antares, fading out at the Milky Way. It is sunlight reflecting off meteoric dust in the plane of the solar system.
Jupiter is the ‘morning ‘star’, rising around 5 a.m. at the beginning of the month and 3:20 at the end. It is the brightest ‘star’ in the sky (till Venus appears) and shines with a steady golden light. Jupiter is catching up on Mars, much fainter and red coloured. At the end of the month they will be nearly level in the northeast. The Moon will be near Mars on the mornings of the 5th and 6th and near Jupiter on the 7th.
*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 sunlight four years to reach the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.
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