🔭 Sky Watch
Tonight's Sky
Drag the time slider to see how the sky shifts hour by hour from your location.
No login, no download
The sky map runs in the browser — plug a laptop into a classroom projector and it works immediately.
Time slider, not just "now"
Move ±12 hours to show a class what the sky looked like at sunset, or will look like at 2am.
Real pass predictions
ISS pass times and planet visibility below are calculated for tonight, not a stock illustration.
Visible Planets
ISS Pass Predictions
Moon Phase
Best deep-sky viewing after moonset, around 02:30 local time.
Reading the Numbers
What "magnitude" actually means
Every object above lists a magnitude — Jupiter at −2.1, the ISS at −3.4. The scale runs backwards: lower numbers are brighter, and each full step down is roughly 2.5 times brighter than the one above it. A magnitude −1 object isn't "a bit brighter" than magnitude 4 — it's in a different class of visibility entirely.
For reference: the faintest stars visible to the naked eye from a genuinely dark site sit around magnitude 6. From a typical suburban backyard with streetlights nearby, that limit drops closer to magnitude 4 — which is why a "clear night" in the city still shows a fraction of what a rural sky reveals.
It's also why the ISS pass above is easy to spot moving steadily across the sky with nothing but your eyes, while the deep-sky objects in the gallery below need a telescope and a dark location — even though both are described on the same numeric scale.
Community
Deep-Sky Gallery
Hover a card — or tap it on mobile — to flip it and see the real distance, designation, and what you'd actually need to see it yourself.
Orion Nebula
MAG 4.0A stellar nursery visible to the naked eye as the fuzzy "star" in Orion's sword. Binoculars resolve it as a distinct glowing patch within an hour of full darkness.
↺
Andromeda Galaxy
MAG 3.4The most distant object visible to the naked eye. Look for a faint smudge above the Great Square of Pegasus on a moonless night, well away from city lights.
↺
Saturn
MAG 0.4Imaged by the Cassini orbiter before its 2017 atmospheric entry. Even a small backyard telescope resolves the rings as a distinct disk separate from the planet.
↺
Milky Way Core
MAG 6.0Best seen from a dark-sky site in summer, when the galactic core rises high enough to photograph with a basic camera on a tripod and a long exposure.
↺