Drag to orbit · scroll to zoom · right-drag or two-finger drag to pan. Hover or tap a body for facts · double-click to follow it.
Night sky tonight: what can I see from here? ›Orrery.live is a free online orrery — an interactive digital solar system model that you explore in your web browser. Every planet is placed close to its true position around the Sun using JPL orbital elements, so the view shows the real arrangement of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto for any date you choose. Drag to orbit the camera, scroll or pinch to zoom, right-drag (or drag with two fingers) to pan, and hover or tap any body to read live facts about it. Double-click a planet or moon to lock the camera onto it and follow it as time plays.
It works as a solar system simulator and a live map in one: press play and the planets move on their real orbits, or pause and read off where each one is today.
Use the date picker or the time slider to scrub forwards and backwards through time, anywhere from 3000 BC to 3000 AD. Speed time up to watch the planets race around their orbits, or pause on an exact moment and copy a shareable link to it. The 'Jump to a notable alignment' menu travels straight to famous planetary alignments, planet parades and conjunctions so you can see how the planets lined up. Those alignments are measured in longitude, as seen from above: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars came within 1° of a line from the Sun in 600 AD. Their tilted orbits still kept them 2.8° apart in space, so even that was not quite a syzygy, a true straight line.
The night sky tonight map turns the same model round to your own horizon: which planets you can see from where you are tonight, when and where to look, with a point-your-phone-at-the-sky mode.
Two companion pages put the same model into words: where the planets are right now lists every planet's distance, light time, evening or morning sky, retrograde motion and next opposition, and planetary alignments and planet parades gives the upcoming and past parade dates with links straight into the orrery. Where is Halley's Comet now tracks the comet live on its way back to its 2061 return, where is Voyager 1 now follows the most distant spacecraft live, about a light-day from Earth, and what is an orrery? explains the name, the gears and the history behind machines like this one. The perfect alignment? asks whether all eight planets ever line up, with the tightest groupings found in a million-year search.
The background is the genuine night sky: 1,637 naked-eye stars from the HYG database in their present-day positions, with optional constellation figures and named bright stars. Planet positions come from real orbital data, while body sizes and orbit spacing are scaled up for visibility — the same compromise used by physical orreries. It also gives a rough guide to which planets are in the evening or morning sky, from their angle to the Sun, and when each next reaches opposition or greatest elongation; the night sky page works out what you can see from where you are.
Follow Halley's Comet, Comet Encke, Hale–Bopp and Rosetta's comet 67P on their real (fixed, so approximate) orbits, or trace Voyager 1 and 2, Pioneer 10 and 11 and New Horizons along trajectories interpolated from JPL Horizons. Tooltips show each planet's distance from Earth, light-travel time, roughly where it sits in the sky and its next opposition or greatest elongation — and the events menu lists upcoming oppositions and elongations computed live from the orbital model.
An orrery (pronounced OR-uh-ree) is a mechanical or digital model of the solar system that shows the planets in their correct relative positions and movements around the Sun. The name comes from Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, for whom one of the first clockwork models was made around 1712. Orrery.live is a digital orrery - a free online, interactive 3D version you can explore in your browser.
Orrery.live opens on today's date, so the planets you see are where they actually are right now. Hover or tap any planet and its tooltip gives a rough guide to where it sits in Earth's sky, judged from its angle to the Sun: an evening-sky or morning-sky object at the moment, up most of the night, or lost in the Sun's glare - plus its distance and light-travel time from Earth and its next opposition or greatest elongation. Whether you can actually see it from where you are also depends on your horizon and twilight, which the night sky page works out.
Each planet's position is computed from JPL's approximate orbital elements, a Keplerian fit valid from 3000 BC to 3000 AD, so the planets appear close to their true heliocentric positions for any date in that range: within about half a degree, and far closer for the inner planets. Orbit spacing and the on-screen size of each body are scaled up for visibility, but each planet's direction from the Sun is kept, so the compact view is not a literal view of Earth's sky.
Any date from 3000 BC to 3000 AD. Inside that range the positions are computed from the JPL data; outside it the simulation still runs but warns that positions are approximate because it is extrapolating beyond the orbital data.
Yes. The 'Jump to a notable alignment' menu lets you instantly travel to famous planetary alignments - popularly called planet parades - and conjunctions, from tight five- and six-planet clusters to the moments the planets spread evenly around the Sun. It includes the planet parades of June 2022, January and February 2025, February and August 2026, and the next big ones on 25 December 2027, 3 February 2034 and 8 September 2040. Those are arrangements on paper: on each date some of the planets sit too close to the Sun, or too low, to see. You can also set any date yourself to check an alignment.
The background is 1,637 naked-eye stars from the HYG database, placed in their true present-day positions on the sky (their slow drift over thousands of years is not modelled). It is the real night sky, not a decorative starfield.
A true-scale solar system model would leave the planets as invisible specks separated by huge empty gaps. Orrery.live keeps positions and orbital geometry real but scales body sizes and orbit spacing for visibility — and the Size and Orbits sliders let you morph the model to true scale to see the emptiness for yourself.
Orrery.live is completely free with no sign-up and runs in any modern browser that supports WebGL, including phones and tablets.