Moon Occults Antares on 11 November: A Daytime Show for Australia and New Zealand

Here is the honest version first. On 11 November 2026 the Moon occults Antares, the red heart of Scorpius, passing directly in front of it, and for most of the world nothing happens at all. The Moon is a hair-thin crescent, it is up in the daytime, and among the places we checked, the cover-up is visible only from Australia, New Zealand, New Caledonia and Fiji. If you live there and own a telescope, though, the afternoon of 11 November is worth planning around. I have worked out the times for ten cities below, so you do not have to guess.

Who actually sees the Moon cover Antares

The global window for this occultation runs from about 02:23 to 06:51 UTC on 11 November, according to the predictions published on in-the-sky.org. A window that long does not mean everyone gets a show. The Moon is only about 46 hours past new, which happened at 07:02 UTC on 9 November, so it sits just 21.5 degrees from the Sun. That puts the whole event in daylight across Australia and New Zealand, and the only twilight you get is at the far eastern end of the track.

We ran our own calculation with astronomy-engine for a list of cities. Perth, Adelaide, Melbourne, Hobart, Sydney, Brisbane, Wellington, Auckland, Nouméa and Suva all get the full disappearance and reappearance. A few places get tantalisingly close and miss. Jakarta passes within about 0.4 degrees of Antares, Darwin and Port Moresby about 0.5, while the Moon's own radius is only 0.25 degrees. Tokyo misses by a little over a degree, and Delhi, Mumbai, Johannesburg, London and Cairo are all out of the picture, either because Antares is below the horizon or because the Moon passes well clear of it.

The times, city by city

These are for the centre of each city, in local time. The first time is when Antares vanishes behind the Moon and the second is when it comes back out.

• Perth: 11:27 am to 12:46 pm AWST
• Adelaide: 3:00 to 4:16 pm ACDT
• Melbourne: 3:40 to 5:02 pm AEDT
• Hobart: 3:40 to 5:05 pm AEDT
• Sydney: 4:02 to 5:13 pm AEDT
• Brisbane: 3:33 to 4:03 pm AEST
• Wellington: 6:23 to 7:31 pm NZDT
• Auckland: 6:28 to 7:38 pm NZDT
• Nouméa: 5:03 to 5:25 pm local time (UTC+11)
• Suva: 6:09 to 6:42 pm local time (UTC+12)

Move a hundred kilometres and those times shift by a few minutes, so treat them as a guide and not as a stopwatch. Our numbers also ignore the mountains and valleys on the Moon's edge, which can change a contact by a few seconds. For a precise time at your own back garden, use the International Occultation Timing Association pages or the visibility tool on in-the-sky.org.

Why New Zealand and Fiji have the edge

Look at the amber bars in the chart. Antares is about the same brightness as the other first-magnitude stars, but a bright sky swallows it. In Perth the Sun is still 72 degrees high when the star reappears, which makes the whole thing a hard hunt. In Auckland the Sun has dropped to about 4 degrees by the end, in Wellington to about 7, and in Suva it has already set and sits about 6 degrees below the horizon. The darker the sky, the better your chance of seeing the star wink out and return.

So if you are choosing where to stand, the rule is simple: go east. The nearer you are to the date line, the later in the day the occultation happens and the lower the Sun is. That is also why the Auckland and Wellington windows, which start around 6:25 pm local time, and the short one in Suva look the most promising of the lot.

Why a 4 per cent Moon is a real challenge

A crescent this thin is a difficult target even without a star hiding behind it. At the moment of cover the Moon is only about 3.7 per cent lit. You will need a clear, haze-free blue sky and some idea where to look, and a telescope with a decent finder or a computerised mount makes it much easier. I would not promise anyone a naked-eye sighting of Antares in daylight. Binoculars might show the crescent, but a small telescope is what you really want.

One safety note, and I mean it. The Sun is only about 20 degrees away from the Moon. Never sweep a telescope or binoculars around that part of the sky unless you are completely sure where the Sun is, and never point them anywhere near it. If you are not confident, find a spot where a building or a tree blocks the Sun, or use a mount that finds the Moon for you. Looking at the Sun through an optical instrument can blind you in an instant.

The double star that nobody can see on this one

Antares has a hidden partner. A fainter companion of roughly fifth magnitude sits only 2.7 arcseconds from the red supergiant, and it was first spotted during an occultation in April 1819, when Johann Tobias Bürg watched the star from Vienna, according to Space.com. Because the companion lies to the west, it reappears about five seconds before Antares does at the edge of the Moon, as another Space.com guide explains.

Which edge matters here. The Moon moves eastward against the stars, so a waxing Moon covers a star at its dark eastern limb and uncovers it at the bright western limb. On 11 November the reappearance happens on the sliver of sunlit Moon, in daylight, so seeing the companion is essentially out of the question. The disappearance on the dark limb is the cleaner event, and it is the moment when the Moon occults Antares in the most dramatic way. If you want the real Antares double-star spectacle, you need one of the occultations where the reappearance happens at a dark limb at night.

If you are in the Americas, there is still a consolation prize

From the Americas the occultation itself happens while the Moon is below the horizon, but the pairing is still there on the evening of 10 November. About twenty or thirty minutes after sunset, when the Sun is 4 degrees below the horizon, we found the thin crescent about 4.3 degrees from Antares in São Paulo, about 3.3 degrees in Santiago and about 3.0 degrees in Mexico City. In São Paulo the Moon is 13 degrees up at that point and sets about an hour later. In Santiago it is 14 degrees high and sets about an hour and twenty minutes later, but for Mexico City, Houston and Los Angeles it is only 3 to 8 degrees above the horizon and sets within the hour, so you need a clean view toward the south-west and probably binoculars.

It is a nice test of your skills rather than a showpiece. For a more relaxed look at the dusk sky this month, our November 2026 night sky guide and the planets visible tonight page are better starting points, and the planet parade guide covers the dawn side of the month.

Just one chapter in a long series

This is not a one-off. Lunar occultations of Antares come in series, and the current one began in August 2023 and will run to 27 August 2028, according to Universe Today, which counts 68 events in all. That is a lot of chances, but most of them are in the wrong place or the wrong time of day. Space.com notes that once this series ends, the next one does not begin until 2042. If you can see this month's event, make the effort.

If you would like to follow the Moon yourself, our live Moon tracker shows where it is in the sky right now, the next new moon page counts down to the next one, and the Moon calendar lists the phases for the whole month. Good luck, and clear skies to everyone down under.