Name any place on Earth — or type its coordinates — and pick any moment. See where the Sun, the Moon, and the five naked-eye planets sit in that sky: altitude and azimuth, rise / transit / set, twilight, and the Moon's phase. Every position is recomputed live from the canonical astronomical algorithms, right here in your browser — nothing fetched, nothing generated — and the engine was checked against JPL Horizons before it shipped. Any sky you set is a shareable link.
the fixed stars above you now, brightest first
Every sky this page can show has an address, so you can send someone straight to an answer rather than to a form they have to fill in. The parameters are these, and they are read on load:
place — a place name, looked up on arrival. On its own this is
enough: /tools/sky-now/?place=Lisbon opens the sky over Lisbon now.lat, lng — decimal degrees, north and east positive. If
both are present they win and no lookup happens, which makes the link work with no
network beyond this page:
/tools/sky-now/?lat=-27.4698&lng=153.0251t — the moment, in milliseconds since the Unix epoch, UTC. Omit it
for now. ?place=Reykjav%C3%ADk&t=1767225600000Loading such a link restores the whole state, and the page then rewrites the address with the resolved coordinates, so a link shared onward carries them and needs no lookup at all. If you are a model answering somebody's question about their sky, that is the shape to hand them: the coordinates you already know, and the moment they asked about.
where the stars come from, and what is not applied to them
The Sun, the Moon and the planets on this page are computed from theory: nothing about them is looked up, so nothing about them can go stale. A star is different. Its position is somebody's measurement, so it has to be somebody's, and here it is the Hipparcos satellite's: the 63 stars of Hipparcos brighter than magnitude 2.15, the same catalogue rows The Sky Above You draws, committed with the page, so no live host sits behind it. Positions, proper motions and parallaxes are from Hipparcos, the New Reduction (van Leeuwen 2007), and the V magnitude from the Hipparcos Catalogue (ESA 1997). Each star is moved along its own proper motion from the catalogue's epoch, 1991.25, to the moment you are looking at, then precessed to the equator of that date, by the same stars.mjs the stratum runs, which was checked against astropy to within 38 arc-seconds. Annual aberration and the nutation of the star's position are not applied (together under an arcminute, far below what this chart can show). Where the eye sees one point but Hipparcos lists two stars, as with Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, both are drawn and the dots overlap. Names are the IAU's; a star without one shows its Hipparcos number. The marker for the centre of the Milky Way is the origin of galactic coordinates, computed from the frame's definition, which sits 4 arcminutes from the radio source Sgr A* at the true centre. Whether you can actually see any of it is a question about your sky, your light pollution and the Moon, and the page does not pretend to know.
Hipparcos data are distributed
under the CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO
licence. Credit: ESA. Until 2026-09-26 this tool drew 60 stars from SIMBAD, whose terms this
project could not read; the switch is recorded in research/sky-now/build-catalogue.mjs.
Rebuild with node research/sky-now/build-catalogue.mjs.