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.
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 saved or sent anywhere. 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 |
|---|
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.