Observing Planner

Sun, moon, planets, satellite orbits and all events are calculated by your browser (Meeus, JPL orbital elements, SGP4) and checked against JPL Horizons, the U.S. Naval Observatory, NASA’s eclipse data and the RASC Observer’s Handbook. Stars, catalogue, orbital data and thumbnails are stored on this server; only the sky photographs of the zoomed-in map come from CDS, Strasbourg. The scores are my own estimates and the weather does not feed in – for that, see Astro Weather.

Coordinates, sizes and position angles: SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France · Planetary orbits: JPL (NASA) · Planetary magnitudes: Mallama & Hilton (2018) · Stars and constellations: d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn (BSD licence) with star data from XHIP/Hipparcos (ESA) and the IAU constellation boundaries · Proper motions and parallaxes: Hipparcos new reduction (van Leeuwen 2007) via VizieR (CDS) and Milky Way outlines by Jose R. Vieira · Thumbnails: Digitized Sky Survey, produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166 from plates of the Oschin Schmidt Telescope (Palomar) and the UK Schmidt Telescope, © Caltech, AAO, PPARC and AURA; cut-outs with hips2fits (CDS) · Sky photographs in the star map: DSS colored as HiPS from CDS (CNRS/Université de Strasbourg), fetched live from alasky.cds.unistra.fr, or Pan-STARRS DR1 (PS1 Science Consortium, data from MAST at STScI) and 2MASS (University of Massachusetts & IPAC/Caltech, NASA/NSF), also as HiPS from CDS · Double stars: Washington Double Star Catalog (Mason et al., U.S. Naval Observatory) via VizieR, positions from SIMBAD (CDS, Strasbourg) · Further galaxies, nebulae and clusters when zoomed in: OpenNGC by Mattia Verga, CC BY-SA 4.0 – the extract data/ngc.json is shared under the same licence · HII regions: Sharpless catalogue (Sharpless 1959) via VizieR, positions and cross-identifications from SIMBAD (CDS, Strasbourg) · Caldwell numbers: after the list in the English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0 · The Moon when zoomed in: colour map of the CGI Moon Kit, NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (LRO/LROC) · Satellite orbits: CelesTrak (NORAD), magnitudes: Heavens-Above · Comet orbits: JPL Small-Body Database · Meteor showers: International Meteor Organization. Scores and location classes are derived from these. This research has made use of the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (DOI 10.26093/cds/vizier; the service was described in A&AS 143, 23, 2000), and of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France (Wenger et al. 2000, A&AS 143, 9).