Sky companion
Planets tonight
Which planets you can see from where you are tonight, when to look, which way to face, and how high to look.
No location set. Search a city or use your location.
Location is shared with the other field tools and stays in this browser only.
Set a location to see tonight’s planets where you are.
Tonight
Where to look
The whole horizon, unrolled. Slide through the night to watch the planets and the Moon rise and set. Lines across the sky mark 30° and 60° up; straight overhead is 90°.
Planet or star?
- Planets shine more steadily
- Stars are so far away that each is a single point of light, and the moving air above you makes that point flicker. Planets are close enough to show a tiny disk, which averages out the flicker. Near the horizon, though, even a planet can twinkle.
- They stay near one line across the sky
- The planets, the Moon, and the Sun all travel along nearly the same path, called the ecliptic, because their orbits lie close to one flat plane. A bright “star” near the Moon or along the Sun’s daytime track is often a planet.
- Measure the sky with your hand
- Hold your fist out at arm’s length: it covers about 10° of sky, whatever your size, because bigger hands come with longer arms. Three fists up from the horizon is about 30°.
- They wander
- Watch the same planet for a few weeks and it drifts against the stars around it. The word planet comes from the Greek for wanderer.
Free, with no ads. If these tools help your sky-watching, you can leave a small tip on Ko-fi, an online tip jar for independent makers.
Planet positions: computed in your browser from NASA JPL’s orbital elements (Standish, “Approximate Positions of the Planets”), checked against JPL Horizons to within a few arcminutes. Moon: the Astronomical Almanac’s low-precision formulas. Brightness: the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac. City search and time zones: Open-Meteo. These organizations do not endorse Amphibian Publishing.