Stars & constellations · Sky finder
What’s above me?
Choose a place and a time. The finder works out which bright stars and constellations should be up, which way to face, how high to look and when each is best placed, for any night from 2000 to 2050.
You are reading in Historical beliefs. The finder shows the same sky in every lens. What different peoples have seen in these stars is in star stories and constellation stories, each linked from its guide.
You are reading in Astrology & myths. The finder shows where stars are, not what they mean for you: it never turns tonight's sky into a horoscope. How astrology has read the stars and signs is in stars and constellations in astrology & myth.
1 Where are you?
Your browser will ask first. The position is rounded to about 10 km and kept only in this page.
From a list of about 8,000 cities that comes with this site, each with its own time zone.
Enter coordinates instead
No place chosen yet.
Nothing you choose here is sent anywhere, and nothing is saved unless you press “Remember this place on this device”; otherwise leave or reload the page and it is gone. How the finder handles your location.
2 When?
3 Where to look
“Likely easier to spot under clear skies” is as far as a calculation can go. It knows nothing about cloud, haze, buildings, hills, streetlights or your eyes. Suggestions come from this site's selected list of bright stars and constellations; planets are not included.
Everything the finder knows about
| Name | Now | Meets the criteria tonight |
|---|
4 Simulated sky for your location
Look around the sky for the place and time above: drag, or use the buttons and arrow keys. It is a calculation, not a camera: it knows nothing about cloud, haze, city light, hills or buildings.
Loads NASA's star imagery from this site (about 0.5 MB on a phone, 1.9 MB on a large screen, and about 0.7 MB more for each part of the sky you zoom right in on). Nothing is sent anywhere.
Star imagery: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio. Gaia DR2: ESA/Gaia/DPAC. Constellation figures based on those developed for the IAU by Alan MacRobert of Sky and Telescope magazine (Roger Sinnott and Rick Fienberg). NASA's page (opens in a new tab). Stars and figures: the Bright Star Catalogue (Hoffleit & Warren 1991); constellation lines are the IAU figures from NASA's map; the IAU draws none for Microscopium or Mensa, so theirs are Stellarium's (CC BY-SA 4.0 (links open in a new tab)), as published. Nebulae, clusters and galaxies: the SIMBAD database, CDS, Strasbourg. Meteor shower radiants: the International Meteor Organization. Planets and the Moon: this site's own calculation. Nothing here is endorsed by NASA or ESA.
How to read the results
Altitude is how high to look: 0° is the ideal horizon and 90° is straight overhead. A fist at arm’s length covers about 10°. Near 90°, the finder just says “almost overhead”, because a compass direction stops meaning much there.
Direction is the azimuth, measured clockwise from true north: 0° north, 90° east, 180° south, 270° west, rounded to 5°. A phone compass may point to magnetic north, which can be several degrees or more away from true north depending on where you are, and this page does not use your phone's compass.
The criteria are this site's rule of thumb for a useful suggestion, not a law of nature: the Sun at least 12° below the horizon, and the star at least 20° up (for a constellation, the middle of its key pattern 20° up with every anchor star above the horizon). “Tonight” runs from local noon to noon the next day, so the hours after midnight count as the same night.
Altitudes are geometric. The air bends light and lifts things near the horizon by around half a degree, by an amount that depends on the weather, so the finder does not pretend to know it. Positions come from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue and have been checked against an independent calculation; how, and how well.