Mercury
morning sky, before sunrise
Never far from the Sun, and only worth chasing within a week or two of greatest elongation.
13 November 2026 · computed at 06:42 UTC
Overhead
The state of the Sun, where the aurora reaches tonight, what the Moon is doing, which planets are up, and what is due past. The Moon and the planets are computed rather than fetched — they were arithmetic long before there was anything to ask — and the space weather is NOAA's, refreshed on every gather.
The auroral oval
Meteor showers
The same rock, a very different night, depending on which half of the world you are standing on
From the northern hemisphere
Leonids
· peaks in 5 days
15/hr at best · realistically about 5 from a dark garden
Quiet in most years and extraordinary in a few: the 1966 storm reached thousands an hour, and the parent comet returns every 33 years.
Visible from both hemispheres, with a slight advantage to the north.
Geminids
· peaks in 32 days
150/hr at best · realistically about 50 from a dark garden
The richest shower of the year, and the strangest — its parent is a rock, not a comet. Slow, bright, often yellow, and the radiant is up all night.
Excellent from the north and still good from the south, which is unusual and welcome.
Ursids
· peaks in 40 days
10/hr at best · realistically about 3 from a dark garden
Small, northern and almost always ignored because it lands in the week after the Geminids.
Circumpolar north only. Nothing at all below the equator.
From the southern hemisphere
Leonids
· peaks in 5 days
15/hr at best · realistically about 5 from a dark garden
Quiet in most years and extraordinary in a few: the 1966 storm reached thousands an hour, and the parent comet returns every 33 years.
Visible from both hemispheres, with a slight advantage to the north.
Geminids
· peaks in 32 days
150/hr at best · realistically about 50 from a dark garden
The richest shower of the year, and the strangest — its parent is a rock, not a comet. Slow, bright, often yellow, and the radiant is up all night.
Excellent from the north and still good from the south, which is unusual and welcome.
Lyrids
· peaks in 161 days
18/hr at best · realistically about 6 from a dark garden
The oldest shower on record — Chinese observers wrote it down in 687 BC. Modest most years, with occasional unexplained surges.
Better in the north, where the radiant is high, but workable from either hemisphere.
The chart
Every star down to magnitude 5, where it is right now, from where you are
Say where you are — the panel below, or the button here — and the sky over that spot is drawn.
The rim of the circle is your horizon and the middle is the point directly overhead; north is at the top and east is to the left, because you are looking up at this rather than down at a map. The two faint rings are 30° and 60° up — a clenched fist at arm's length is about ten degrees, so the inner ring is six fists above the skyline. Stars are the Yale Bright Star Catalogue down to magnitude 5, which is roughly what a suburban sky shows; the constellation figures are the stick shapes people actually point at rather than the official boundaries. Positions are catalogue J2000 without precession or refraction — a fraction of a degree out, and far better than anyone can point.
From where you are
Station passes and tonight's darkness, computed in your browser
Visible station passes
Enter a position above and the next five days of visible passes will appear here.
Passes are computed from the station's published orbital elements, fetched 2026-11-13 06:42 UTC, using Kepler's equation plus the secular effects of Earth's equatorial bulge. Against fresh elements that lands within a minute or so over a few days. A pass is listed only when all three conditions hold at once: the station is above 10° from your horizon, the Sun is at least 6° below it, and the station itself is still in sunlight — which is why they cluster after dusk and before dawn.
Passing close
Inside twenty lunar distances, next two months
2026 VP8
2.9 lunar distances · 1,133,704 km
9–20 m · 6.2 km/s
2019 XF2
3.1 lunar distances · 1,189,881 km
10–23 m · 10.2 km/s
2026 VJ13
3.5 lunar distances · 1,347,680 km
9–20 m · 10.4 km/s
2026 QQ8
3.5 lunar distances · 1,351,903 km
1–3 m · 0.8 km/s
2026 VV8
3.6 lunar distances · 1,379,090 km
15–35 m · 6.3 km/s
2010 VQ
4.6 lunar distances · 1,752,568 km
8–17 m · 4.3 km/s
2026 VN11
5.2 lunar distances · 1,980,921 km
31–70 m · 7.1 km/s
2026 VQ5
5.2 lunar distances · 1,997,660 km
46–103 m · 11.6 km/s
2026 VT12
6.4 lunar distances · 2,461,763 km
23–52 m · 20.2 km/s
2025 XN6
6.9 lunar distances · 2,654,367 km
4–9 m · 12.2 km/s
2022 VB2
7.7 lunar distances · 2,972,587 km
25–55 m · 9.0 km/s
2026 VK13
8.0 lunar distances · 3,091,855 km
13–28 m · 8.6 km/s
Every one of these is tracked, and none of them is going to hit anything. The Moon is 384,400 km away, which is one lunar distance; a rock passing at two is closer than most of the things in this list, and still four times further out than any satellite.
On this day
The whole calendar →1971 · 55 years ago
Mariner 9 enters orbit around Mars
The first spacecraft to orbit another planet, arriving to find the whole surface hidden by a global dust storm.
Everything else up there
All 110 Messier objects →This page is the sky as a whole — where the Moon is, which planets are up, what the Sun is doing. What it does not tell you is whether any particular thing in it is worth going outside for, which depends on how bright your sky is and what you would be looking through.
The object pages answer that one. Each of the 110 Messier objects has its own page giving magnitude, surface brightness and a computed table of whether it is straightforward, a challenge or hopeless — for nine grades of sky against five instruments, from the naked eye to a 200mm telescope. The month it is best in and the altitude it reaches from six latitudes are on the same page, because an object that never clears your horizon is not a matter of aperture.
Space weather comes from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center and the close approaches from JPL's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. The chart's stars are the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, its figures Olaf Frohn's.
The Moon and planets are accurate to about a degree — enough to say where something is, not enough to point a telescope with.
This page does not know where you are. The planet notes hold from anywhere on Earth, and rise and set times, which do depend on your latitude, are not guessed at.