Five planets are easy to see with the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They follow the same band of sky as the Sun and the Moon, the ecliptic, and they move slowly against the stars, which is where the word “planet”, “wanderer” in Greek, comes from. Venus, the brightest, is the “evening star” or “morning star” and never strays far from the Sun; Jupiter is often the next brightest; Mercury is the hardest to catch, low in the twilight. Give your location to get, for tonight, the planets above your horizon, the direction to look, their brightness and when they rise and set.
Which planets are visible tonight?
Computing…
Your location
Give your location: the sky depends on where you are.
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Questions and answers
Can I see Uranus and Neptune?
Uranus is at the limit of naked-eye visibility under a very dark sky; Neptune needs binoculars or a telescope.
What does “magnitude” mean?
A scale of brightness where smaller numbers are brighter: Venus reaches about −4, the brightest stars about 0, and the faintest stars visible to the naked eye about 6.
Where the numbers come from
Values refresh every second in your browser; the published data are checked every 10 minutes and updated several times a day.