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Planetarium
The stars stay put; the Sun, Moon and planets move to where they were, or will be, at that moment.
drag to look around · scroll or pinch to zoom · double-click to get closer
Planetarium
How the planetarium works
The whole sky from the inside: drag to look around, scroll or pinch to zoom in.
The sky here is the “Deep Star Maps 2020” panorama that NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio built from the Hipparcos, Tycho-2 and Gaia catalogues: every star’s position and colour comes from measurements, and the glow of the Milky Way is rendered from the real density of stars. We wrap that map around a sphere and put you at its centre, so the sky looks the way it does from Earth rather than from outside a globe. As you zoom in, tiles four times as detailed as the opening image are loaded for the part you are looking at.
Drawn over the panorama is our own catalogue: the figures and boundaries of all 88 constellations, the 333 stars with names approved by the International Astronomical Union, and the 110 Messier objects — nebulae, galaxies and clusters. It is the same data as the star atlas, so any object can be opened there for the full story. The constellation lines land exactly on the panorama’s stars because the NASA map and our catalogue share the same J2000 coordinates.
The Sun, Moon and planets are computed in your browser for the chosen moment with the astronomy-engine ephemerides, accurate to a fraction of a degree — enough to see which constellation Jupiter is in tonight or where the Moon will meet the Pleiades. The Moon is placed as seen from the centre of the Earth, so near the horizon it can differ from the apparent position by about a degree. The current view is kept in the page address: share the link and the other person sees the same patch of sky.
Panorama: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio, Deep Star Maps 2020 (public domain). Catalogues: Bright Star Catalogue, Hipparcos, IAU-CSN, NGC 2000.0. Ephemerides: astronomy-engine.