At 2 AM on Sunday, November 1, 2026, clocks in most of the United States and Canada go back to 1 AM, and the sky does not care at all. The Sun still sets at the same moment; it is only the number on the clock that changes. But for anyone who watches the sky by the clock, Sunday is the biggest single change of the year: sunset in Dallas jumps from 6:37 PM on Saturday to 5:36 PM on Sunday, full darkness arrives before 7 PM, and the pre-dawn planets are now up before most alarms. Here is what moves, what does not, and the oddity of a 25-hour day with no moonrise.

What changes on Sunday

From our Dallas sun and moon calculations, Saturday October 31 against Sunday November 1:

  • Sunset: 6:37 PM, then 5:36 PM.
  • End of twilight (astronomical dusk): 8:00 PM, then 6:59 PM. The sky is fully dark an hour after dinner instead of two.
  • Sunrise: 7:44 AM, then 6:45 AM.
  • Dawn (civil twilight): 7:18 AM, then 6:19 AM.

Europe made the same switch a week earlier, on October 25, which is why the gap between Dallas and London went from six hours to five for a week and is back to six from Sunday. Arizona (outside the Navajo Nation) and Hawaii stay on standard time all year and see no change. The southern hemisphere is on summer time already, and the tropics, including the Philippines, never change.

The evening sky gets an hour earlier

The practical gift of the change is darkness at a civilised hour. By 7 PM on November 1 the sky over Dallas is as dark as it will get, and the first week of November has the Moon rising after midnight, so the evenings are moon-free as well.

  • Saturn is the bright steady point low in the east at dusk, about 20 degrees up at 6 PM and 50 degrees high in the south by 10 PM, at magnitude 0.8. A small telescope shows the rings, nearly edge-on this year. Neptune is in the same part of the sky, a telescope target at magnitude 7.8. The Saturn page gives its altitude for any hour.
  • Uranus rises in the north-east in the early evening and is high by midnight, heading for opposition on November 25. At magnitude 5.6 it needs binoculars and a chart.
  • The Milky Way and the autumn deep-sky sights, Andromeda overhead and the Pleiades climbing in the east, get their best dark-sky evenings of the season between the clock change and the new moon on November 9.
  • The Southern Taurid meteor shower peaks on the night of November 4 to 5 with a 13 percent Moon that does not rise until 3 AM. Rates are low, up to five an hour, but the Taurids are famous for slow, bright fireballs, and early evening is as good as any time since the radiant is up all night. The Northern Taurids follow on November 11 to 12 and the Leonids on November 16 to 17.

The morning sky gets a late start

Dawn now comes at about 6:20 AM, which means the pre-dawn sky is at its best around 5 to 6 AM, an hour that many people are already awake for. That matters this week because the morning sky is where the action is:

  • Jupiter and Mars stand 60 to 70 degrees high in the south-east at dawn, Jupiter at magnitude -2.0 and Mars at 0.9, with Regulus beside them. On Monday, November 2 the crescent Moon joins them, a degree from Mars; our guide to that morning has the hour-by-hour view. Mars passes 1.2 degrees from Jupiter on November 16.
  • Venus returns to the dawn from about November 2, very low in the east, and climbs quickly. By November 7 it is 15 degrees up at dawn with the crescent Moon and Spica beside it.
  • Mercury is at inferior conjunction on November 4 and reappears low in the dawn later in the month, reaching greatest elongation on November 20.

The Moon: a last quarter and a day with no moonrise

Sunday is also the day of last quarter, at 2:28 PM Central, with the Moon setting at 1:21 PM. And here is the oddity. The Moon rises at 11:57 PM on Saturday night, and the next moonrise is at 12:06 AM on Monday. Sunday, November 1, despite being 25 hours long, has no moonrise at all. This is not a glitch from the clock change; it happens somewhere in the world every day, because the Moon rises on average 50 minutes later each day and once a month that delay carries a moonrise across midnight. Our explainer on why the Moon rises later every night walks through it with this week’s times. The last quarter page has the phase details and the next dates.

What does not change

  • The sky itself. The Sun, Moon, planets and stars follow the same track they would have followed anyway. Sunset is 61 minutes earlier on the clock only because the clock moved 60 minutes and the Sun set a minute earlier, as it does every day in autumn.
  • Times on this site. Every page here shows times in the time zone of the city you have chosen, and the switch to standard time is built into those zones, so the moon calendar, the event pages and the push alerts carry on without adjustment. If you compare a time you noted last week with one from this week, remember to allow for the hour.
  • UTC. The UTC times on the events calendar never shift. The Hunter’s Moon was full at 04:11 UTC on October 26; the November full moon, the Beaver Moon, is at 14:53 UTC on November 24, which is 8:53 AM Central Standard Time.

A note on the extra hour

If you were out on Saturday night watching the gibbous Moon rise at 11:57 PM below Orion, with the Pleiades high above, you got an extra hour under that sky for free. Spend it on the Orionids, still trickling in from Halley’s Comet until November 7, and on the Hunter’s Moon’s southern limb, which is tipped unusually far toward us this week. From Sunday, the evening sky belongs to everyone who is home by seven.