Lunar Occultations 2026-2028: What India Can See

In the early hours of 3 November 2026, the night of 2–3 November, the Moon will pass in front of Jupiter as seen from Chennai and Bangalore. From Chennai the planet’s centre goes behind the Moon at 02:31 IST and comes back out at 03:05; from Bangalore the two times are 02:30 and 03:02. No other city on this page is covered that night. It is the first of 12 lunar occultations that the twelve cities below will see between 1 November 2026 and 31 December 2028: six of Alcyone, the brightest star of the Pleiades, five of Antares, and that single one of Jupiter.

Every time, altitude and count here was computed from the JPL DE421 ephemeris for each city separately. The Moon is close enough that where you stand on the Earth shifts it against the stars, so an occultation is not one event for all of India but a different one, or none, for each town.

How the Census Was Made

English Wikipedia’s article on occultation describes a lunar occultation as the Moon passing in front of a star during its orbital motion, and says a star occulted by the Moon disappears or reappears in a tenth of a second or less, because the Moon has a very thin atmosphere and a star’s own disc is tiny. That is why both contacts here are instants. The calculation was run for nine targets: five bright stars near the Moon’s path (Alcyone, Aldebaran, Regulus, Spica, Antares) and four planets (Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), from 1 November 2026 to 31 December 2028.

First, every pass of the Moon within 1.6° of a target as seen from the centre of the Earth was found; there are 81. Then, for each pass and each of the twelve cities (Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Chandigarh, Patna), the program asked whether the target’s centre went behind the Moon’s disc as seen from that city. If it did, the city is covered. A covered city sees the occultation, in this page’s sense, only if the Moon is above its horizon at the disappearance or at the reappearance. Each contact with the Moon up is then given a sky class from the Sun’s altitude: dark once the Sun is more than 6° below the horizon (after civil twilight), twilight from there to sunrise or sunset, and daylight with the Sun up.

The last column of the city tables is the chord: how deep the target goes behind the disc, where 1 means it passes behind the centre and 0 that it only touches the edge. Below 0.15 the page calls the chord shallow. Close to the edge the real Moon is not smooth; the Wikipedia article describes such near-edge passes, grazes, in which the star can disappear and reappear several times as the irregular edge of the Moon moves past it. For shallow chords the times, and even whether the target is covered at all, depend on that limb profile, which this calculation does not have.

Every Occultation Seen From the Twelve Cities

By year: 1 in the last two months of 2026, 3 in 2027 and 8 in 2028. The Moon lit column is the share of its disc in sunlight at the moment of closest approach, as seen from the Earth’s centre. A waxing Moon is in the evening sky and a waning one in the morning sky; on the waxing side the target goes behind the dark edge first, on the waning side behind the bright edge, and the Wikipedia article notes that dark-edge events are the easier ones to watch and time because there is no glare.

City by City, to the Minute

Times are IST, cut to the minute (the generator found each contact to the second). Moon altitude is for the centre of the Moon, geometric, without the lift that refraction adds near the horizon. “Moon down” marks a contact that happens below that city’s horizon; the other contact is the one that city sees.

Jupiter on the Night of 2–3 November 2026

This is the only Jupiter occultation in the span that any of the twelve cities is covered for, out of 8 geocentric passes of the Moon within 1.6° of the planet. It is not a daytime event. The Sun is well below the horizon at both contacts in both cities, and the Moon, 38% lit and waning, stands +23.2° up at Chennai’s disappearance and higher at the reappearance. The chord is shallow in both cities (0.12 and 0.12): the planet goes only a little way in from the edge of the disc, which is why the cover lasts at most about 34 minutes. Where a chord in this census is deeper than 0.9, the cover lasts from 40 to 65 minutes. A shallow chord is the case where the real limb decides, so these minutes are the least firm on the page.

The times are for the planet’s centre. Jupiter shows a small disc, not a point, so its edge goes behind the Moon a little before the centre and comes out a little after. The calculation does not time that; it gives the centre only.

Four Seen From All Twelve Cities

Only four events are seen from every city, all in 2028. On 22 January 2028 Antares will go behind a waning 19% Moon before dawn with the sky dark at every contact, though in some cities the Moon will barely have risen: at Ahmedabad it is +0.3° up at the disappearance, a height where hills, haze and buildings can hide it. On 3 March 2028 and again on 14 August 2028 the Pleiades go behind the Moon around midday, with the Sun high. On 13 April 2028 Antares is covered around dawn behind a waning Moon, 84% lit, and here the sky class depends on the city: dark at some contacts, twilight or daylight at others, as the table above shows.

The midday ones need a plain warning. Of the 68 times a city sees a star occultation in the span, 34 take place in daylight at every visible contact, and 32 have at least one contact under a dark sky. A star such as Antares or Alcyone against a daylight sky is not a naked-eye sight; this page does not say whether any instrument will show one. In two city-sightings the Moon is under 5° at every contact the city sees.

Why Chennai Sees the Jupiter Event and Hyderabad Does Not

The Moon is near enough that its position against the stars shifts by up to about a degree depending on where on the Earth you stand. This is parallax. On the night of the Jupiter event, Chennai is covered with a chord of 0.12, while Hyderabad, about 520 km away, is not covered at all. On the evening of 30 March 2028 the Pleiades go well behind the Moon from Delhi (chord 0.54), while Mumbai, about 1,150 km away, is not covered; that evening only the seven cities farthest north, Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow, Chandigarh and Patna, see it.

Parallax also explains why the geocentric figure alone says little about India. On 10 September 2028 the Moon will pass within 0.09° of Alcyone as seen from the Earth’s centre, and none of the twelve cities is covered. On 6 June 2028 its closest geocentric pass to Antares is 1.01°, just over a degree, and Chandigarh is covered, with a shallow chord.

How Rare Is a Lunar Occultation?

Over the span, 28 of the 81 close passes cover at least one of the cities. Of those 28, 16 happen with the Moon below the horizon in every covered city, so they cannot be seen from any of them, and 12 are seen. The Pleiades and Antares supply every covered star event; Regulus, Venus and Mars come within 1.6° geocentrically but never cover a city.

Spica, Aldebaran and Saturn have no geocentric pass closer than 1.6° in the span at all. That is not because they are too far from the Moon’s path in general. The Wikipedia article puts the band in which the Moon can occult a star at ecliptic latitudes between −6.6° and +6.6°, and in the site’s star table Spica is at −2.1° and Aldebaran at −5.5°, both inside it, as are Regulus (+0.5°), Antares (−4.6°) and Alcyone (+4.1°). The Moon’s tilted path swings slowly against the stars, in the 18.6-year cycle followed on the moonrise direction page linked below, so which stars it reaches changes from one decade to the next; between 1 November 2026 and the end of 2028 it does not reach those two, nor Saturn.

The same 12 events add up to 70 city-sightings, spread unevenly. Chennai sees the most, 9; Mumbai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Lucknow and Patna each see 5, the fewest; Delhi sees 6, 3 of them with a dark-sky contact.

The events no city sees still happen. In 16 of them the target goes behind the Moon somewhere in the twelve-city set while the Moon is below that city’s horizon: Alcyone (Pleiades) on 24 November 2026, Antares on 4 January 2027, Antares on 27 March 2027, Antares on 21 May 2027, Alcyone (Pleiades) on 4 June 2027, Alcyone (Pleiades) on 28 July 2027, Antares on 11 August 2027, Alcyone (Pleiades) on 21 September 2027, Antares on 4 October 2027, Alcyone (Pleiades) on 18 October 2027, Antares on 1 November 2027, Antares on 28 November 2027, Alcyone (Pleiades) on 12 December 2027, Alcyone (Pleiades) on 5 February 2028, Antares on 18 February 2028 and Alcyone (Pleiades) on 20 June 2028. They are left out of the tables above.

The Pleiades, Antares and the Nakshatras

A. L. Basham’s 1954 table of the nakshatras, as reproduced in English Wikipedia’s Nakshatra article and used on the site’s fixed-stars page, gives the Pleiades as the stars of Krittika and Antares as the star of Jyeshtha. The site’s own Moon routine puts the Moon in Krittika at the first disappearance of every Pleiades occultation in the city tables. At the Antares ones there it puts the Moon in Anuradha, not Jyeshtha, because Antares’s own Lahiri longitude falls in Anuradha, less than a degree short of the Jyeshtha arc. On the Jupiter night the Moon is in Ashlesha. These are positions, nothing more.

How Accurate the Minutes Are

English Wikipedia’s occultation article gives the Moon’s motion against the stars as 0.55 arcseconds a second, which is about half a degree an hour, so a contact is a sharp instant and a minute is a meaningful unit for it. It would not be for the slow drift of Jupiter or Saturn, and no time for their own motion is given here. Four simplifications are built in. The times are for the centre of each city; across a large city they move by some minutes, more for a shallow chord. The Moon is a smooth sphere, and the real limb moves each contact by seconds and settles every graze. A planet is treated as its centre. Altitudes are geometric, without refraction. Shallow chords make up 15 of the 70 city-sightings, the shallowest 0.01 at Chennai (Antares, 13 April 2028). Five events are shallow in every city that sees them: Jupiter on 3 November 2026; Alcyone (Pleiades) on 10 April 2027; Alcyone (Pleiades) on 24 May 2028; Antares on 6 June 2028; Alcyone (Pleiades) on 28 December 2028. Treat all of those as near-misses that may or may not happen.

What This Page Does Not Give

The page attaches no significance to the Moon covering a planet or a star. It measures where two bodies appear in the sky from a given city, and no such measurement can test a meaning, so none is offered for anyone. It also cannot promise a sighting. Cloud, haze, a low horizon, city lights and a daylight sky decide that, and none of them is modelled.

In Brief

• First in the span: Jupiter, early hours of 3 November 2026, Chennai and Bangalore only, shallow chord
• Seen from the twelve cities, 1 November 2026 to 31 December 2028: 12 occultations (6 Pleiades, 5 Antares, 1 Jupiter)
• Seen from all twelve: Antares 22 January, Alcyone (Pleiades) 3 March, Antares 13 April and Alcyone (Pleiades) 14 August 2028
• Covered but with the Moon down everywhere: 16
• No pass closer than 1.6°: Aldebaran, Spica and Saturn; close passes but never covered: Regulus, Venus and Mars
• Most for one city: Chennai, 9; Delhi 6

Where the stars themselves lie in the sidereal and tropical zodiacs is on the fixed stars positions page, and the Moon’s phases for 2027 are on the moon phase calendar. The Moon’s rising point on the horizon, and its slow swing north and south, are worked out on the moonrise direction page. Other sky events computed the same way: the planet parade dates, the meteor showers of 2026–27 and the opposition dates of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.