How to find which planets are visible tonight from where you live

How to · Updated 2026-11-10

Enter your place and date, then read when each planet rises, when it is highest and how bright it is. A worked example for Delhi and quick ways to check what you see.

To see which planets are up tonight, you need their rise, set and highest times for your exact place, plus how bright they are. Open Sky tonight, set your city and the date, and the Planets and the Moon table lists all seven, with the ones too low or too close to the Sun greyed out.

What you need

• Your place. A city from the list, your latitude and longitude, or your phone’s location. The position never leaves your device.
• The date of the evening you plan to look. The tool treats the night as one unit, so 1 a.m. still belongs to the previous evening.
• A view of the sky in the direction the planets will be. Planets follow roughly the same path across the sky as the Sun and Moon, so a clear view low to the east, south (from the northern half of the world) and west matters most.

Step by step

1. Press Change at the top of the page and pick your city, or type latitude and longitude, or press Use my location. Tick Remember my place on this device if you want it next time.
2. Choose the night in Night of, and pick the zone you want in Times in. It starts on your device’s own zone; choose the place’s local time if you are planning for somewhere else.
3. Read The night: sunset, the hours when it is properly dark, sunrise, and the Moon’s phase with its rise and set.
4. In Planets and the Moon, each row gives the planet’s rise, the time and height when it is highest, its set, its magnitude (Mag) and its constellation (In). The last column, Tonight, gives the best time to look and how high it will be then.
5. Under the table, a chart plots each visible planet’s height through the night over a band that shows daylight, twilight and full dark.
6. Tap a planet’s name to open its own height chart in the altitude planner.

Two numbers decide whether you will see a planet:

• Height (altitude) in degrees above the horizon. 0° is the horizon, 90° is straight up. Below about 10°, trees, buildings and haze usually hide it; the tool greys out any planet that never gets above 10° during the night.
• Magnitude, a brightness scale where smaller numbers are brighter. Anything brighter than about 6 can be seen with the eye under a dark sky; city skies stop near 3 or 4.

A worked example

Take Delhi on the night of 20 November 2026, with times in India Standard Time.

• The Sun sets at 17:25 and it is properly dark from 18:47 to 05:26.
• The Moon is a waxing gibbous, 81% lit, and sets at 03:02. It will brighten the sky until then.
• Saturn (mag 0.5, in Cetus) is already up at sunset. It is highest at 20:57, 62° up. This is the planet for the evening.
• Mars (mag 0.6) and Jupiter (mag −2.1), both in Leo, rise just before midnight (23:50 and 23:44) and are about 70° up by 05:17, just before dawn.
• Venus (mag −4.8) rises at 04:07 and is 14° above the eastern horizon at 05:17: low, but by far the brightest point in the sky.
• Mercury is greyed out. It sits too close to the Sun to see.
• Uranus (mag 5.6) is up nearly all night, but only just at the eye’s limit; Neptune (mag 7.8) needs binoculars or a telescope.

So for an early evening look, go out after 19:00 and face south for Saturn. Early risers get Jupiter, Mars and Venus together before sunrise.

Check your answer

• Bright, steady light. Planets shine with a calm light, while stars near the horizon flicker. If your “planet” twinkles hard and changes colour, it is probably a star.
• Right part of the sky. Planets stay close to the Sun’s yearly path, the line called the ecliptic, which runs through Leo, Taurus, Pisces and their neighbours, such as Cetus. A bright point far from that band is not a planet.
• Venus and Mercury only at the ends of the night. Their orbits are inside Earth’s, so they always appear near the Sun: in the west after sunset or the east before sunrise, never high at midnight.
• Night to night. Check the next evening. A planet should rise and set a few minutes earlier, not jump to a new part of the sky.

Questions people ask

Can I see planets from a city? Yes. Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn are bright enough to cut through light pollution. The faint outer two, Uranus and Neptune, need a dark site and optics.

When is the best time to look at a planet? When it is highest, because you look through less air and the image wobbles less. The Highest column gives that time. If it falls in daylight, use the Tonight column’s best time.

How do I know when a planet is at its best for the year? The Sky events calendar lists oppositions (when an outer planet is closest and brightest) and the best times to spot Mercury and Venus, month by month, and the moon phase simulator shows why the Moon’s phase changes how dark your night will be.