The October window
Mercury retrograde, October 2026.
Computed in America/New York (Eastern Time); every time prints its UTC offset.
Three weeks that get blamed for more than they cause. Below: when this one actually starts and ends, computed to the minute rather than rounded to a tidy date — what the tradition Orrery scores with flags for those weeks, what it doesn’t, and where the clean hours inside the window are.
Mercury stations retrograde Sat, Oct 24, 3:13 AM EDT and direct Fri, Nov 13, 10:54 AM EST.
Scores compare moments; they do not promise results.
| Stations retrograde | Stations direct |
|---|---|
| Sat, Oct 24, 3:13 AM EDT | Fri, Nov 13, 10:54 AM EST |
What the tradition flags
Mercury governs the moving parts of ordinary life: messages, agreements, arrangements, the fine print. Traditional electional practice treats its retrograde weeks as poor timing for starting things in that domain — signing, launching, announcing — and as good timing for the re-verbs: revising, renegotiating, repairing, finishing what is already open. That is the whole of the claim. Not doom; drag.
What it isn’t
It isn’t a prohibition. People sign leases, take jobs, and get married inside every retrograde there has ever been, and those things go the way they were always going to go. Orrery weighs the retrograde as one factor among several, never as a veto, and it will not tell you an outcome — it compares moments and shows the reasoning. Timing is one input to a decision that stays yours.
The clean hours inside the window
Because the retrograde is only one of the scored factors, days inside it still score differently from each other. The Moon’s void-of-course hours move daily, the phase turns, and the Moon’s approach to the planet that matters for your particular decision changes through the day. A retrograde Tuesday with a clean Moon can outscore a direct Friday that goes void all afternoon.
If you want to work around it
The straightforward move is to put the starting things outside the window and the finishing things inside it. Anything before Sat, Oct 24, 3:13 AM EDT is not in this retrograde at all; anything after Fri, Nov 13, 10:54 AM EST is past it. Between those two moments, use the day scores rather than the label — that is what they are for. The full rulebook is in Method.
The coming week, in one email
The Orrery brief: each week’s computed sky — stations, void hours, the clean windows — free, one email a week, unsubscribe in one click.
Elsewhere
Engine 0.6.0 · config v3 · JPL de440s.bsp · tzdata 2026.3. Station times are computed, not copied — check any row against a published ephemeris.