·
properly dark
moon up
cloud trend
events · tap one
How to read it: face the compass point, look up the height shown.
Short, honest explainers for everything the site tracks, and how each one is scored.
A football-field-sized laboratory with a permanent crew, orbiting 400 km up at 27,600 km/h. It circles Earth every 93 minutes, and when it crosses your sky in the right conditions it outshines every star: a steady, fast, silent point of light. You're seeing sunlight bouncing off its solar panels while you stand in darkness. When it fades out mid-sky, it has flown into Earth's shadow.
How it's scored: This site computes each pass from current orbital data and only shows the ones you can actually see: station above your horizon, still in sunlight, your sky dark.
Tiangong (“Heavenly Palace”) is the only other crewed station up there: three modules, a rotating crew of three, orbiting slightly lower than the ISS. It is about a fifth of the ISS's size but still nearly as bright in the sky, and far fewer people know to look for it.
How it's scored: Same three visibility conditions as the ISS. Its orbit is less tilted, so from mid-latitudes its passes tend to cross lower in the sky.
Every Starlink launch releases dozens of satellites in a tight line. For the first days they fly in formation: a slow chain of lights crossing the sky, and one of the most-reported “UFO” sightings on Earth. Within a week or two they spread out and fade into the thousands already up there.
How it's scored: The site watches SpaceX's own published orbits, detects batches that are still bunched, and predicts their passes. No fresh launch means no train, so the card comes and goes.
A night rocket launch is visible far beyond the launch site: a rising point of flame, then a glowing exhaust plume that can light up hundreds of kilometres of coastline. Twilight launches are the spectacular ones, when the plume catches sunlight against a dark sky.
How it's scored: The site lists upcoming launches within about 800 km of you and flags the night ones. Rockets scrub and slip constantly, so always check before driving anywhere.
Charged particles from the Sun, funnelled down Earth's magnetic field lines, making the upper atmosphere glow. The southern lights (aurora australis) and northern lights (borealis) are the same thing seen from opposite ends. How far from the poles they reach depends on how hard the solar wind is hitting: that is what the Kp index measures.
How it's scored: The site combines NOAA's live oval forecast, the Kp forecast for tonight, and real-time solar wind data, then compares it against your latitude. Phone cameras see aurora before eyes do: a 3-second exposure at a dark horizon is the honest first test.
Comets shed debris along their orbits; when Earth ploughs through a debris stream, we get a meteor shower. The streaks all trace back to one point in the sky (the radiant), and each shower repeats on the same dates every year. What varies is the moon, your clouds, and whether the radiant rises over your horizon.
How it's scored: The site scores each active shower for your location tonight: expected rate, radiant height, moonlight and cloud. Twenty phone-free minutes of dark adaptation triples what you'll see.
Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars are all naked-eye objects; Venus and Jupiter often outshine every star. The giveaway: planets shine steadily while stars twinkle. Binoculars show Jupiter's moons; any telescope shows Saturn's rings.
How it's scored: The site lists whichever planets are genuinely worth looking at tonight, with the direction, height and best time.
When two bright objects (the Moon and a planet, or two planets) drift close together in the sky, it is called a conjunction. Nothing is physically near anything else, but the lineup makes the sky's best free photo: a crescent Moon beside Venus needs no telescope and no skill.
How it's scored: The site checks every pairing each night and flags anything within a few degrees.
A lunar eclipse is Earth's shadow crossing the Moon: slow, safe to watch, and rust-red at totality. A solar eclipse is the Moon crossing the Sun: spectacular and genuinely dangerous without certified eclipse glasses. Sunglasses do not count, at all.
How it's scored: The site computes the next eclipses visible from your exact location and flags anything in the coming week.
Our own galaxy, seen edge-on from inside. The bright core (toward Sagittarius) is a southern-sky highlight: from a truly dark site it is naked-eye obvious, from a city it is invisible. The season and the moon decide whether tonight is worth the drive.
How it's scored: The site flags nights when the core rides high, the moon is out of the way and the cloud forecast cooperates.