Real Time Solar System.

Australia · -33.87°, 151.21°

Tonight from Sydney

Dark from 17:57 to 05:56. Up and worth looking at: Saturn, Venus, Mars.

All times are local to Sydney (Australia/Sydney), 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.

PlanetRisesHighestHow highSetsBrightness
Saturn20:4102:5653°08:28mag 0.4
Venus08:1417:5739°21:09mag -4.6
Mars03:2505:5623°13:14mag 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.

PlanetHighestHow highBrightness
Neptune01:2655°mag 7.8
Uranus05:5635°mag 5.7

Low but present, if you have a clear horizon: Jupiter (6°).

Sun and darkness

Sunset
17:32
Civil dusk
17:57
Fully dark
18:55
Sunrise
06:21

The Moon

Waxing gibbous, 90% lit. It rises at 14:36 and sets at 05:10. 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 Sydney, the eclipse of 22 July 2028 will be total, covering 100% of the Sun at maximum. That happens at 14:01 local time, with the Sun 29° above the horizon.

Begins 12:40, ends 15:14. 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 34°S, an object on the celestial equator tops out at 56° — 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.