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New Moon in Scorpio, November 2026: Who to Tell About a New Start

The New Moon on November 9, 2026 falls at 17° Scorpio. Mercury turns direct four days later, and Venus follows within hours. A week after the New Moon, Mars and Jupiter meet in Leo. Scorpio is the sign associated with what’s held in confidence, and Leo is the sign associated with being seen. With the Sun in one and Mars and Jupiter in the other, this New Moon puts a practical question in front of any new start: keep it private, or tell people, and if so, whom.

Quick facts

The chart in brief

The Sun and Moon meet at 17° Scorpio. Mercury is retrograde at 7° Scorpio and Venus is retrograde at 23° Libra. Mercury turns direct on November 13, and Venus a few hours later. The Mercury and Venus retrograde guide covers both stations.

Mars and Jupiter are in Leo, the sign that squares Scorpio. They meet on November 16, the first Mars-Jupiter conjunction in Leo since June 1991, after both cross the Moon’s South Node earlier that week. Then the Sun squares the nodes on November 17, Jupiter on November 18, and Mars on November 19. Astrologers call this shape a T-square, and here the Scorpio Sun sits at its point of tension.

Human Design places the Sun in Gate 1, Self-Expression, from November 5 to 11, with the Earth opposite in Gate 2, the Direction of the Self. Both are gates of the G Center, which the system associates with identity and direction. The numbers repeat the theme: 3, which Pythagorean numerology associates with expression and communication, is both the Universal Month for November 2026 and the Universal Day for November 9.

Should a new intention stay private?

A common question at a New Moon is whether to keep a new intention to yourself or say it out loud. Research gives a more specific answer than either.

Being noticed can stand in for doing. In experiments published in 2009, Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues had students write down an intention tied to a career goal, such as studying more seriously. When an experimenter read and acknowledged it, the students acted on it on fewer days over the following week than students whose intentions went unread. The researchers’ explanation is that being noticed gave them “a premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity.” The effect appeared only in students strongly committed to the goal.

Who hears it changes the result. In 2020, Howard Klein of Ohio State University and colleagues found that students who shared a goal with someone they saw as higher in status, an assistant introduced as an expert, were more committed and did better. Sharing it with someone introduced as lower in status did no better than telling no one. “The important thing is that you need to care about the opinion of who you are telling,” Klein said.

Both sets of studies involved students, but read together they separate two kinds of telling. Acknowledgment from an audience can supply some of the satisfaction of having already arrived. One listener whose judgment matters raises the cost of letting the intention drop.

How to start it

The first step below has been tested directly. The other two follow from the studies above and are reasonable inferences, not proven methods.

• Write the intention as a plan. “I’m becoming a runner” names an identity. “If it’s 7 a.m. on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, then I run for 20 minutes” names an action, a time, and a place. A 2006 review of 94 independent tests by Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran found that if-then plans like this help people follow through. Later reviews of specific areas found smaller effects, though still positive ones.
• Tell one person whose opinion you value. In Klein’s studies, the benefit depended on caring how the listener would judge the outcome. A mentor, a teacher, or a colleague whose standards you respect fits that description better than a group chat or a public post.
• Share the plan rather than the identity. The 2009 authors suggested, without testing it, that an if-then plan might protect an intention from the noticed effect, because the plan ties the action to a cue instead of to recognition.

If the new start depends on an agreement with someone else, both retrogrades have ended by November 14 UTC. The retrograde guide covers what the tradition does and doesn’t say about agreements made during one.

Who feels this most

The New Moon falls at 17° Scorpio, so a planet or chart angle between about 14° and 20° of any fixed sign (Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, or Aquarius) receives a close aspect from it. The T-square that follows sits between 24° and 28° of Leo, Aquarius, and Scorpio, so placements from about 22° to 29° of the fixed signs meet it in the second week. Without a placement in either range, the houses that Scorpio and Leo occupy in a chart show which areas of life the month’s activity runs through.

What’s in the sky

The New Moon itself can’t be seen. Before dawn, Mars and Jupiter stand high in the southern sky in Leo, with Jupiter far brighter than Mars. On the morning of November 16 the two are about 1.2° apart, a little more than two widths of the full Moon. The Leonid meteor shower peaks on the night of November 17 to 18. The first-quarter Moon sets around midnight that night, so the hours before dawn are dark.

Closing

This New Moon starts a cycle in the sign associated with privacy and trust, while the planets of drive and expansion gather in the sign associated with display. The research doesn’t choose between keeping a new start private and announcing it. It points to form and audience instead: an intention written as a plan and told to one person whose opinion matters has better support than an identity announced to a crowd. With Mercury and Venus both direct by November 14, the second week of this cycle is when plans that were under review can be written down in final form.

More from the observatory

• Full Moon in Taurus Square Pluto, October 2026: Why Letting Go Is Hard
• Mercury and Venus Retrograde Together: A Survival Guide for October 24 to November 13, 2026
• Why Your Sun Sign Doesn't Sound Like You