United Kingdom · 55.95°, -3.19°
Tonight from Edinburgh
Dark from 21:05 to 05:22. Up and worth looking at: Saturn, Mars.
All times are local to Edinburgh (Europe/London), for the night of . Rebuilt hourly.
Visible without a telescope
Sorted by how high each one climbs while the sky is dark. Anything below about ten degrees is being seen through too much atmosphere to be worth it, so it is left out.
| Planet | Rises | Highest | How high | Sets | Brightness |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saturn | 21:29 | 03:43 | 37° | 10:12 | mag 0.4 |
| Mars | 00:51 | 05:22 | 34° | 18:24 | mag 1.3 |
Up, but you will need optics
These are well placed tonight and too faint to find by eye — Uranus sits at the edge of naked-eye visibility only under genuinely dark skies, and Neptune never reaches it. Both need binoculars at minimum and a chart to tell them from field stars.
Low but present, if you have a clear horizon: Jupiter (10°).
Sun and darkness
The Moon
Waxing gibbous, 90% lit. It rises at 19:49 and sets at 03:32. At this phase it washes out everything faint, so it is a night for planets rather than galaxies.
NaN km away. Phase calendar.
Next solar eclipse from here
Seen from Edinburgh, the eclipse of 2 August 2027 will be partial, covering 27% of the Sun at maximum. That happens at 10:00 local time, with the Sun 37° above the horizon.
Begins 09:11, ends 10:51. The same eclipse looks entirely different a few hundred kilometres away — this is the view from these coordinates, not a general forecast. All eclipses.
Why this page differs from the next town over
Rise and set times shift by about four minutes for every degree of longitude, so a place a hundred kilometres east sees the same sky roughly six minutes earlier. Latitude matters more: it decides how high anything climbs. From 56°N, an object on the celestial equator tops out at 34° — which is why the planets look so different from Reykjavík and Nairobi.
Computed from VSOP87 and an ELP-derived lunar theory, accurate to within one arcminute. Watch it move in the live simulation, or pick another place.