Most people meet an eclipse the way you’d meet a stranger banging on the door at 3am. With alarm. Don’t launch, don’t sign anything, and hide until it passes.
I’ve never worked that way, and neither should you.
An eclipse isn’t a threat. It’s a turning point with the volume turned up. And 2026 has handed us two solar eclipses, one in February and one in August, telling a single story about where your business is being asked to grow and what it’s being asked to release.
Let me walk you through it, so you can work with the timing instead of bracing against it.
What a solar eclipse actually is
A solar eclipse is a new moon with the amplifier on.
At a new moon, the Sun and Moon meet in the same sign, and we get that familiar fresh-start energy, the clean page. A solar eclipse is that same meeting, but the Moon slides directly across the face of the Sun, and the ordinary new moon becomes something far more potent. A genuine threshold moment, the kind of turning point a business can pivot on.
Because the Moon’s shadow only falls across part of the planet, a solar eclipse can only be seen with the naked eye from certain corners of the world, even though its symbolic charge is felt everywhere. How complete the eclipse looks depends on how tightly the Sun and Moon meet the lunar nodes, the points where the Moon’s orbit crosses the Sun’s path. The closer that alignment, the deeper the eclipse and the more weight it tends to carry.
This year we get one of each flavour: February’s was an annular eclipse, a ring of fire around the Moon, and August’s is a total eclipse, the most potent kind of all.
We get somewhere between two and four solar eclipses a year, and they don’t arrive randomly. They come in pairs and families, landing on an axis of two opposite signs, and they run in cycles of around eighteen months. So an eclipse is never really a single event. It’s one chapter in a longer story your business chart has been telling.
Why eclipses matter for your business
Eclipses carry a dramatic reputation. Down the centuries they’ve been tied to floods, famines and the fall of kings, usually in whatever part of the world the shadow crossed. It makes for wonderful mythology. In truth, they’re wild cards. Some rearrange a life, others slip by almost unnoticed, and it’s hard to tell in advance which one you’re getting. So I hold the old lore lightly, and read the chart instead.
Here’s what the chart reliably shows. Solar eclipses tend to bring external events, and in a business they usually arrive as the turning points you didn’t plan. An opportunity that lands in your inbox. A client or a partnership that appears, or falls away. A door that opens onto a direction you hadn’t mapped. They tend to land as something happening to your business, rather than something you sat down and chose.
They also carry a long tail. The immediate window, what astrologers call the eclipse season, runs for around thirty-six days. But the story an eclipse begins can take six months to fully play out, sometimes longer. So the point is not to do something dramatic on the day. The point is to notice what’s being activated, and then work with that theme patiently over the months that follow.
The astrologer April Elliott Kent, in her book Astrological Transits, notes that an eclipse is often felt most in the week leading up to it, and that it tends to land in the body first. You might feel drained, wired, stressed or strangely overexcited without quite knowing why.
She makes a point I love:
“eclipses bring moments of crisis, and a crisis, for all its discomfort, has a way of waking you up”.
It makes you look at your work, and your business, with fresh eyes. And for a business owner that’s worth taking seriously, because your energy is a business resource. So if the fortnight around an eclipse feels charged, that isn’t a sign something is wrong with you or the business. It’s the system getting your attention, often about the very thing that’s ready to change.
In their book Spiritual Astrology, Jan Spiller and Karen McCoy describe solar eclipses as touching our
“collective ego, our collective emotions and our collective karma.”
The house an eclipse falls in, they say, becomes the most active arena of your chart for the six months that follow. It’s the area where you’re invited to set an example, to lead well, and where you may find yourself a little more exposed or held accountable than usual. For a business, that’s gold. It tells you which room of your business is under the spotlight, and where your leadership is being asked to grow.
This is where astrology earns its place at the business table. It doesn’t tell you what will happen. It shows you the cosmic weather, so you can decide how to sail your business through it.
The two solar eclipses of 2026
Here’s what makes this year worth paying attention to. Both solar eclipses fall on the Aquarius and Leo axis. One is the seed. One is the release. And they’re two halves of the same instruction.
17 February 2026: Annular Solar Eclipse at 28° Aquarius
The first eclipse landed in February at nearly 29 degrees of Aquarius.
Aquarius is the sign of community, contribution, innovation and the future. In business terms, this eclipse planted a seed about building something bigger than you. You were invited to prioritise the group over solo endeavours, and leverage over grind. You may have been pulled back to your own unconventional way over the tired playbook.
It squared the ruler of this eclipse, Uranus, the great disruptor. So for many people it arrived as a sudden break from an old pattern, or a jolt that shook something loose.
Cast your mind back to February. What shifted around community, collaboration, or a newer, braver direction in your business, an offer, a partnership, a way of working? That wasn’t a one-off. It was the opening scene.
12 August 2026: Total Solar Eclipse at 20° Leo
The second eclipse arrives in August at 20 degrees of Leo. It falls closer to the South Node than to the North, which makes it a South Node eclipse, the releasing side of the axis. That’s where its letting-go quality comes from, not from the moon phase. Every solar eclipse is a new moon, so this is still a beginning. It’s just the kind that opens by setting something down, where February’s leant towards building.
Leo is the sign of the radiant individual, the performer, the star of the show. Your warmth and your presence are gifts, and they got you here.
But this eclipse asks you to put down the version of Leo that has become a cage: the belief that everything depends on you being brilliant, visible and applauded every single day. The lone-star model, where every dollar is tied to you personally being in the room.
On the wider stage, a Leo eclipse has a way of testing the powerful. Reputations come up for review, egos get exposed, and figures who seemed untouchable can find their standing suddenly in question.
For the rest of us, the lesson is small but sharp. A business built on ego and personal shine is fragile. A business built on substance, service, and a strong community is not. It’s one more nudge to make sure your authority rests on the work, not the performance.
Put the two together, and the story is clear. Release the solo performance (Leo), and build the collective future (Aquarius).
The February eclipse showed you where you’re growing. The August eclipse shows you what you have to set down to get there.
What eclipses have done in my own business
I don’t teach this from theory. I’ve watched eclipses move the furniture in my own life.
In 2023 one landed right on the partnership angle of my chart, and rather than something I chased, an opportunity walked in through the door. That eclipse window is when my oracle deck found its publisher. I didn’t force it. The timing opened, I was ready, and I said yes. That is the texture of eclipse energy at its best. Not something you push into being, but a threshold that opens when you’ve done the inner work of being ready to walk through it.
That’s the invitation of any eclipse. Do the preparation now, in the business and in yourself, so that when the door opens, you’re standing close enough to step through.
Look back to look forward
Eclipses run in long families called Saros cycles, first named by the ancient Babylonians. Each Saros series produces an eclipse roughly every eighteen years and runs for well over a thousand years, and each family carries its own character.
Bernadette Brady, who did more than anyone to bring this into modern astrology, teaches that you can sense how an eclipse will play out by looking at the family it belongs to.
This year’s two eclipses come from two different families.
The August total eclipse belongs to Saros Series 10 South, a mature family born in 1179 and running until 2459. Bernadette Brady names its character as a hopeful one. It’s about breaking out of a situation that has felt stuck, or even hopeless, into a wider space full of options. A worry that’s been sitting on you suddenly clears, a solution shows itself, and the work is to take it up without too much delay.
On a Leo eclipse, in your business, that reads as permission. The way out of carrying it all yourself is there to be seen, and to be acted on. The last time this exact family came around was August 2008, also in Leo. What was taking shape for you then often rhymes with what’s stirring now.
The February eclipse belonged to Saros Series 10 North, an older family, born in 944 and winding down by 2188. Brady names this as carrying a strong emphasis on communication, which in a business is your marketing, your launches, your content and your conversations, often alongside frustrating or blocking events and a real tiredness.
Her counsel is practical and kind: slow down, and work through things one at a time. If February felt like a loud, effortful, slightly draining stretch in the business, that was the signature. It was asking you to pace the work, not force it.
There’s also a simpler way to use the cycle. This Aquarius and Leo eclipse family was last active from 2017 to 2019, and before that 1998 to 2000. Think back to those seasons. What was being built, released or reshaped in your work and your life? The themes rarely repeat exactly, but they rhyme. The thread you were pulling on then is often the same one being handed back to you now, at a higher turn of the spiral.
How to find the eclipse impact on your business
Here is how to make this specific to your business rather than generic.
Find the houses in your business chart that hold Aquarius and Leo, and look at where 28 degrees of Aquarius and 20 degrees of Leo fall. Those two areas of your business are the ones lit up this year.
Then look for any planets or angles sitting within a few degrees of those points. If an eclipse closely touches one of your business’s personal planets or angles, by conjunction, square or opposition, you’ll feel this year’s story far more in your business. That’s where the turning point is most likely to land.
The Aquarius house shows where your business is growing towards: community, systems, contribution, leverage. The Leo house shows what you’re being asked to put evolve out of: the performance, the ego-tie, the need to be the single point of brilliance.
For the August eclipse in particular, here’s the concrete version. Find 20 degrees of Leo in your business chart. Any planet or angle within about four degrees of it, so 16 to 24 degrees of Leo, will feel this eclipse most directly, and the nature of that planet or angle is where the story plays out. You’ll also feel it strongly if you have anything around 16 to 24 degrees of Taurus or Scorpio, which square the eclipse and tend to bring the tension, or around 16 to 24 degrees of Aquarius, which sits opposite and usually arrives through other people.
Leo asks you to lead from the heart and let yourself be seen, without needing the applause.
Take my own business chart. The February eclipse in Aquarius fell in my business’s 7th house, around five degrees from my Business Descendant, the angle of clients and partnerships. My business Descendant sits in Aquarius, the sign of community, so this lit up my soul clients and the collective heart of my work, and it landed right as my Mastermind successfully relaunched.
The August eclipse in Leo sits in my business 12th house, around three degrees from my Business Ascendant and just off my Business Jupiter. The 12th is the hidden engine room, and Leo there, this close to my rising sign, is asking me to release the belief that all of the business’s energy has to be drawn from me. Jupiter in that house has always whispered that the growth can come from something bigger than my own output.
Put together, the two eclipses tell one story. I’ve already built the team that holds the coordination, the marking and the daily support. The one thing still drawn entirely from me is the coaching itself, running the calls, being the one in the room. A lead coach is the last release, someone who can hold the room, run the mastermind calls, and stand in when I’m away or unwell, so the business no longer pauses the moment I do.
Working with this year’s eclipses
You don’t need to overhaul your business by a particular date, and you don’t need to force a launch or a big decision onto the day of the eclipse itself. Eclipse work is slow work. Notice the theme each eclipse lights up, work it into your business decisions over the months that follow.
If reading a business chart the way we just have is the work that lights you up, learning to do it for your own clients is exactly what my Level 2 Business Astrology Certification teaches. It’s the training that turns a natal astrologer into a specialist business astrologer, someone who can read timing, offers, money and growth straight from the chart. Doors open again soon, and you can join the Level 2 waitlist here to be first to know.