# What does the night sky look like tonight?

> What does the night sky look like tonight? A free, live star map for your place: Moon, planets, stars and constellations, or any date from 1900 to 2100.

HTML: https://www.theuniversecounts.com/you/your-sky/star-map

Numbers as of 2026-11-01 15:33 UTC. Live ones keep changing on the HTML page.

Tonight's sky depends on where you are - and on the very minute you look. The live map below shows this sky for your location right now: the Moon, the planets, the stars you could see with your eyes alone on a dark night, the constellations and the Milky Way. Choose another place, or any date and time from 1900 to 2100, and the map redraws that sky.
Every point of light on this map is a message from the past. Even the nearest star beyond the Sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2465 light-years away.

- The Moon's distance from Earth right now: 371,949 km
- Venus's distance from Earth: 42,060,624 km
- Jupiter's distance from Earth: 821,274,488 km
- Saturn's distance from Earth: 1,279,540,328 km

## How to read the star map

What is a star map?

A star map is a picture of the whole sky above one place at one moment. Imagine lying on your back in an open field, with your head to the north. The centre of the star map circle is the point straight above you. The rim is the horizon all the way round, marked N, E, S and W. East is on the left, because that is where it falls when you look up from there.

The brighter a star, the bigger its dot. Thin lines join the stars of each constellation, and the constellations' names are in capitals. The pale band is the Milky Way: the glow of countless stars in the disc of our own galaxy, too far away to see one by one. Small open symbols, each with its name, mark star clusters, nebulae and galaxies, such as the Andromeda Galaxy. Each planet is a dot inside a small ring, and the Moon is drawn with its phase.

Under the circle, the map prints its date, its local time with the offset from UTC, and its place. On a dark night the circle is black. In twilight it turns deep blue, and by day it is paler still, with a note that the Sun outshines the stars. The stars are drawn anyway, because they are still there.

## Why does the sky turn?

Earth's spin

The stars are not racing across the sky. We are turning beneath them. Earth spins once on its axis, measured against the stars, in 23 h 56 m 04 s. As it turns, stars rise in the east, climb, and set in the west, just as the Sun does. At the equator the spin carries the ground along at 0.4651 kilometres per second.

Earth's axis points at one spot in the northern sky, very close to the star Polaris. So Polaris hardly moves, and the whole northern sky wheels around it.

That turn against the stars is a little shorter than the day on our clocks, which follows the Sun. Earth is also moving along its orbit, so each day it has to turn a little extra to face the Sun again. The result is that every star rises slightly earlier each night, and over a year the whole sky slides past. The stars of a winter evening are the stars of a summer morning. Set the map to tonight, then to the same hour half a year from now, and watch the constellations change places.

## Every star you see is the past

Old light

Light is the fastest thing there is, but space is wide. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year: 9.5 trillion kilometres, enough to go around Earth's equator about 240 million times.

So the starlight in your eyes tonight is old. Sirius, the brightest star of the night, is 8.6 light-years away, so the light you see left it that many years ago. Rigel, the bright blue-white star in Orion, is about 860 light-years away; careful measurements still place it between 790 and 1,030 light-years from us. For Deneb, in the Swan, two careful ways of measuring give two different answers, somewhere between 1,240 and 2,830 light-years. The question is still open.

Each star on the map sends you a different date. Some of that light set out before you were born, some before your great-grandparents were. The sky you see is not one moment but many, arriving together. That is the quiet wonder of looking up: we all stand under the same old light, and it is still on its way.

## What did the sky look like on my birthday?

Star map by date

The map can show the sky over any place at any minute from 1900 to 2100. Type the town where you were born, the date and, if you know it, the time. The sky that appears is the one that stood over you then, whether or not anyone looked up. Time zones before 1970 were not always written down, so the map prints the UTC offset it used, and you can check it.

Since then, Earth has carried you once around the Sun for every year of your life, at 29.78 kilometres per second. At that speed, London to New York would take about 3.1 minutes. Since you opened this page, Earth has carried you [counts up live on the page] kilometres around the Sun.

There is a quieter link too. Altair is 16.7 light-years away, Vega 25.0, Arcturus 36.7, Capella 43 and Aldebaran 67. If one of those numbers is close to your age, the light reaching you from that star tonight left it around the year you were born.

Or try 20:17 UTC on 20 July 1969, the minute Apollo 11 landed. From Aarhus, the Moon hangs low in the west with Jupiter just above it, and Mars glows low in the south beside Antares.

## North and south: two different skies

Northern and southern hemisphere

Where you stand on Earth decides which part of the sky you can see. The map is drawn for your latitude, so the sky over Aarhus and the sky over Sydney share some stars and miss others.

In the north, the sky turns around Polaris. South of the equator, Polaris stays below the horizon, and no bright star marks the southern pole of the sky. Instead the Southern Cross points the way towards it, and two soft patches of light, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, hang nearby. They are neighbouring galaxies, visible to the eye from dark places.

The south also has the nearest stars the eye can see. Rigil Kentaurus and Toliman, the bright pair of Alpha Centauri, are 4.34 light-years away. Proxima Centauri, a small red star close to them in the sky, is nearer still, but too faint to see without a telescope.

Familiar shapes look different too. Orion, a winter sight from Europe, stands on his head in a southern summer sky. And from near the equator, over a year, you can see almost every star there is to see. Wherever you live, half of the sky belongs to someone on the other side of the world, and they are looking up at it too.

## FAQ

### What is the bright light in the sky tonight?

Most likely a planet. After the Sun and the Moon, Venus is the brightest thing in the sky, and Jupiter is often next; Mars can rival them when it comes close. Planets usually shine steadily, while stars twinkle. The map labels every planet that is up, so look in that direction on the map. Right now Jupiter is 821 million kilometres away.

### How can I tell Jupiter from Venus?

By the time and the direction. Venus never strays far from the Sun in our sky, so it shows only in the west after sunset or in the east before sunrise. Jupiter can be high in a fully dark sky, even in the middle of the night. Venus is usually the brighter of the two. Set the map to your place and time, and both are labelled.

### Can I see the planets line up?

The planets never form a straight line in space, but they always appear near one curving path across the sky. They orbit the Sun in nearly the same flat plane, and we look at that plane from inside it. When several are up at once, you can trace them along that arc on the map. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn can be seen with the eye alone; Uranus and Neptune need binoculars or a telescope.

### What is the strange moving light in the sky?

If it moves steadily across the stars without blinking, it may be the International Space Station or another satellite, lit by the Sun high above you. The station circles Earth at 7.66 kilometres per second. Satellites are not on the map, but planets are: a bright point that keeps its place among the stars is worth looking up there.

### Can I see the night sky on a specific date?

Yes. Choose a place and any date and time from 1900 to 2100, and the map redraws the sky for that minute: a birthday, a wedding, the night someone was born. The positions on the map are worked out for that moment, which is printed under the circle.

## Related

- [How fast are you moving?](https://www.theuniversecounts.com/you/your-journey/how-fast-are-you-moving.md)
- [Where are the planets right now?](https://www.theuniversecounts.com/solar-system/planets/where-are-the-planets.md)
- [How far away is the Moon right now?](https://www.theuniversecounts.com/earth-and-moon/the-moon/how-far-is-the-moon.md)

The light landing in your eyes tonight set out years, centuries and more ago, and it falls on everyone under the same sky. Whose sky would you most like to see?

## Sources

- Distance to Aldebaran (Measured, with error): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Altair (Measured, with error): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Arcturus (Measured, with error): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Capella (Measured, with error): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Deneb (Debated): [Astronomy & Astrophysics (arXiv version): Quantitative spectroscopy of Deneb (Schiller & Przybilla 2008, A&A 479, 849; doi:10.1051/0004-6361:20078590)](https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.0040); [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Rigel (Estimated): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Rigil Kentaurus (α Centauri A) (Measured, with error): [The Astronomical Journal (arXiv version): Precision Millimeter Astrometry of the α Centauri AB System (Akeson et al. 2021, AJ 162, 14; doi:10.3847/1538-3881/abfaff)](https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.10086)
- Distance to Sirius (Measured, with error): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Distance to Vega (Measured, with error): [Astronomy & Astrophysics: Validation of the new Hipparcos reduction (van Leeuwen 2007, A&A 474, 653)](https://arxiv.org/abs/0708.1752)
- Earth's average distance from the Sun in kilometres (Measured): [NASA: Earth: Facts](https://science.nasa.gov/earth/facts/)
- Earth's circumference at the equator (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Earth Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
- Earth's diameter at the equator (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Earth Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
- Earth's speed around the Sun (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Earth Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
- Great-circle distance between London and New York (Measured, with error): [NASA NSSDCA: Earth Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
- Jupiter's distance from Earth (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Jupiter Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/jupiterfact.html)
- Length of a light-year (Measured): [NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics: Astrodynamic Parameters](https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/astro_par.html)
- Length of one turn of Earth (sidereal day) (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Earth Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
- Saturn's distance from Earth (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Saturn Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/saturnfact.html)
- Speed of Earth's spin at the equator (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Earth Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/earthfact.html)
- The International Space Station's orbital speed (Measured): [NASA: Station Facts](https://www.nasa.gov/international-space-station/space-station-facts-and-figures/)
- The Moon's average distance from Earth (Measured): [NASA: Moon Facts](https://science.nasa.gov/moon/facts/)
- The Moon's distance from Earth right now (Measured): [NASA: Moon Facts](https://science.nasa.gov/moon/facts/)
- Typical adult walking speed (Estimated): [Physiotherapy (Elsevier): Normal walking speed: a descriptive meta-analysis (Physiotherapy 97(3), 182–189)](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physio.2010.12.004)
- Typical cruising speed of a long-haul airliner (Estimated): [EUROCONTROL: Aircraft Performance Database: B789 (Boeing 787-9)](https://contentzone.eurocontrol.int/aircraftperformance/details.aspx?ICAO=B789); [EUROCONTROL: Aircraft Performance Database: A388 (Airbus A380-800)](https://contentzone.eurocontrol.int/aircraftperformance/details.aspx?ICAO=A388)
- Venus's distance from Earth (Measured): [NASA NSSDCA: Venus Fact Sheet](https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/venusfact.html)