Void-of-course Moon calendar: is the Moon void now?

On its way through a sign, the Moon keeps meeting the Sun and the planets at the classic angles: conjunction (0 degrees), sextile (60), square (90), trine (120) and opposition (180). Each of those meetings is an aspect. At some point it makes the last one it will make in that sign, and from then until it crosses into the next sign it has nothing left to meet. That stretch is the void of course. The name is old: William Lilly described a planet as void of course in Christian Astrology (1647) when it has separated from one planet and applies to no other before leaving its sign.

The Moon changes sign about every two and a half days, so a void comes round 13 or 14 times a month, 160 times in 2026 by our count. Most are short. In 2026 half of them last under seven hours, 16 last less than an hour, and 21 run a full day or more; the longest is almost 45 hours. Together they cover about a fifth of the year.

The tradition reads the void Moon as a time when things started tend not to come to much. Lilly wrote that a matter begun while the Moon is void seldom comes to much. Modern electional astrology keeps the idea in a softer form: avoid launching, signing, buying something big or making a first approach during a void, and use the hours for routine, rest, tidying up and finishing what is already moving. None of this is a law of physics, and nothing in the sky changes at the start of a void. It is a timing convention, and it only helps if you pick your moments with it.

Short voids of a few minutes rarely matter to anyone. The long ones are where the convention has teeth: a void that runs through a whole working day is worth checking before a signing or an interview. If you plan with it, look at the length column in the table first.

Different calendars can print different start times for the same void, and the reason is almost always the list of bodies. The modern rule, which most astrology calendars print today, counts aspects to the Sun and every planet from Mercury to Pluto. The traditional rule stops at Saturn, since Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were unknown to Lilly. When the Moon's last aspect in a sign is to an outer planet, the traditional void starts earlier, at the last aspect to a visible planet. In 2026 that is the case for 28 of the 160 voids; in 2027, with Uranus and Neptune placed differently, only for 3.

Other differences are smaller. Some calendars add aspects to Ceres or Chiron, some round to the quarter hour, and many print one time zone (often US Eastern) for everyone. We use the modern rule with the ten classical and modern bodies, compute every aspect and ingress to the second, and show the result in the time zone of your device.

For each sign the Moon passes through, our engine finds the moment it enters, then tests every aspect to the Sun and the eight planets on the real, moving sky: the Sun alone drifts about 2.5 degrees while the Moon crosses one sign, so an aspect cannot be read from a frozen chart. The last aspect before the next ingress opens the void, and the ingress closes it. Positions are apparent geocentric longitudes of date, from VSOP87 for the planets and the Meeus lunar theory for the Moon, as in our birth chart.

We check the results against published tables. Our start and end times match the MoonTracks table for September and October 2026 and the Cafe Astrology table for January and June 2027 within three minutes. Where one published ingress time differed by 17 minutes, NASA JPL's Horizons ephemeris sided with our value. The same engine gives the void-of-course line in the lunar calendar, and these periods fill the optional calendar feed above.