February 2026 is not a quiet month. Three major shifts happen within two weeks of each other, and the cumulative effect is the kind of atmosphere where things actually change — not in the abstract motivational poster sense, but in the concrete, Hellenistic sense. Planets change signs. A new eclipse series begins. A 36-year cycle resets.
Here’s what’s happening.
Full Moon in Leo — February 1
The month opens with a Full Moon in Leo, with the Sun in Aquarius on the opposite side joined by Mars and Pluto. Leo Full Moons illuminate questions of personal expression and visibility — who are you when you’re not performing for the group? With Mars in Aquarius squaring off against this lunation, there may be tension between what you want to do and what the collective seems to demand.
The Sun rules Leo, so this Full Moon is ultimately the Sun’s business. Check where Leo falls in your whole sign chart — that’s the area of life getting lit up.
Venus Enters Pisces — February 10
Venus moves into Pisces, the sign of her exaltation. In traditional astrology, a planet in exaltation operates at its most effortless and elevated. Venus in Pisces is generous, beautiful, and deeply attuned to connection. Art gets better. Relationships soften. The impulse to give without calculating the return gets stronger.
If you have Pisces placements in your natal chart — especially if Pisces is your 7th house (relationships), 5th house (pleasure, romance), or 2nd house (money, resources) — this transit activates those topics with Venus’s best qualities.
Venus stays in Pisces through early March. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Saturn Enters Aries — February 13
This is the big one. Saturn hasn’t been in Aries since 1996-1999. In Hellenistic astrology, Saturn in Aries is in its fall — the sign opposite its exaltation in Libra. This is Saturn at its least comfortable, its most frustrated. Saturn wants structure, patience, and long timelines. Aries wants to act now.
The result: authority meets impatience. Discipline collides with impulse. Institutions that have held things together through sheer inertia may find they can’t anymore. On a personal level, wherever Aries falls in your chart is about to get a lesson in doing hard things without shortcuts.
Saturn will be in Aries until April 2028. This is a two-year transit. It’s not an event — it’s a season. The people who will navigate it best are the ones who learn to be patient with things that feel urgent.
For those in night charts (born with the Sun below the horizon): Saturn is your most difficult planet by sect. Saturn transits hit you harder. Pay attention to this ingress.
Solar Eclipse at 28° Aquarius — February 17
An annular solar eclipse at the end of Aquarius, inaugurating a new eclipse series on the Aquarius-Leo axis. Eclipses in the Hellenistic tradition were taken seriously — they mark points where the normal order of things is interrupted. The luminaries are disrupted. What was visible goes dark; what was hidden may surface.
This eclipse falls late in Aquarius. If you have natal planets or important points near 28° of the fixed signs (Aquarius, Leo, Taurus, Scorpio), this eclipse is talking to your chart directly.
Eclipses don’t resolve in a day. Their effects unfold over the following six months. Note what comes up around February 17 and watch how the thread develops.
Saturn Conjuncts Neptune at 0° Aries — February 20
Saturn meets Neptune at the first degree of Aries, beginning a new approximately 36-year cycle between these two planets. The last Saturn-Neptune conjunction was in 1989 in Capricorn — a year that brought the fall of the Berlin Wall and the restructuring of entire political systems.
Saturn-Neptune conjunctions dissolve old frameworks and demand new ones. Saturn is structure; Neptune is dissolution. When they meet, the things we thought were solid reveal themselves to be more fragile than we assumed, and something new has to be built in their place.
At 0° Aries — the very first degree of the zodiac — this conjunction carries an initiatory quality. Something is beginning. We won’t fully understand what it is for years. But the seed goes into the ground this month.
Mercury Retrograde Stations at 22° Pisces — February 25
Mercury stations retrograde in Pisces on the 25th. In Hellenistic terms, Mercury in Pisces is in its detriment (opposite Virgo, one of Mercury’s domiciles) — already operating at reduced capacity. Adding retrograde motion compounds the difficulty.
Mercury retrograde in Pisces is not great for precision, contracts, logistics, or anything requiring crisp thinking. It is good for revisiting creative work, sitting with questions that don’t have clean answers, and letting your mind wander productively.
The shadow period began around February 11. If you noticed things getting hazier or communications getting crossed around mid-month, this is why. Mercury stations direct on March 20.
The Month in Summary
February 2026 has the density of a year packed into four weeks. The Saturn ingress alone is a generational shift. The eclipse opens a new chapter. The Saturn-Neptune conjunction resets a cycle that’s been running since 1989.
The practical advice: don’t try to control all of this. The Hellenistic astrologers understood that some months are for acting and some are for witnessing. This is a month for witnessing — paying attention to what’s shifting, noting what falls apart and what emerges, and trusting that the dust will settle.
If you want to understand what these transits mean for your chart specifically, book a reading. General forecasts describe the weather. Your natal chart describes how you personally experience it.