Guided trip

Tonight from your street

Your own sky tonight: a star, a figure, the Moon, a planet, the station's pass.

Your street, as tonight begins

This is your part of the world as tonight's dark arrives. In a moment we go down to the ground and look up. Everything you are about to see is worked out for this place and this night, so you can go outside and check it.

The first star you will notice

As the sky darkens, the brightest stars come out first. A star twinkles because its light is a single point, pushed about by moving air. Its colour is its temperature: the bluish ones are hotter than the Sun, the orange ones cooler.

A figure to find

The lines join stars into the figures people have told stories about for thousands of years. Learn one and you can find the next from it, the way you learn a town from one street. The line below names the one that is best placed for you right now.

The Moon

The Moon rises about fifty minutes later each night, so it is not always in the evening sky. When it is, point any binoculars at the line between its light and its dark. That is where the mountains and craters throw their longest shadows.

A planet, if one is up

A planet looks like a bright star that does not twinkle. Planets drift against the stars from month to month, which is what the word first meant: a wanderer.

The space station, crossing

This is the next time the space station comes over your place. When it can be seen, it is a bright, steady light gliding across the sky for a few minutes, with no flashing lights. That light is the Sun on its solar panels, and there are people inside.

Now go and look

That is tonight, from where you are. The sky you saw is already turning: come back in an hour and every star has moved a hand's width to the west. None of it needs a telescope. It needs ten minutes for your eyes to get used to the dark.

Everything is drawn where it really is, from CelesTrak orbital elements and the planets’ own orbits (astronomy-engine).