South Africa · -26.20°, 28.05°
Tonight from Johannesburg
Dark from 18:15 to 06:04. Up and worth looking at: Saturn, Mars.
All times are local to Johannesburg (Africa/Johannesburg), 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 | 20:50 | 02:54 | 61° | 08:41 | mag 0.4 |
| Mars | 03:20 | 06:04 | 29° | 13:46 | 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 (7°).
Sun and darkness
The Moon
Waxing gibbous, 90% lit. It rises at 15:27 and sets at 05:19. 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 Johannesburg, the eclipse of 6 February 2027 will be partial, covering 6% of the Sun at maximum. That happens at 19:08 local time, with the Sun -3° above the horizon.
Begins 18:36, ends 19:39. 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 26°S, an object on the celestial equator tops out at 64° — which is why the planets look so different from Auckland 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.