🌌 The Solar System

🔭 Where everything is, right now

Positions come from JPL's Keplerian elements for the planets, solved for the date shown — accurate to about an arcminute, which is finer than a pixel here. Each planet's direction from the Sun is exact. Inner draws the first four to true scale. All 8 squashes distance by a square root, because Neptune orbits 78× further out than Mercury and a truthful linear drawing would bury the inner four inside the Sun. Planet sizes are not to scale in either view, or Jupiter would be a full stop and Mercury invisible. Drag the date, or press play and watch the inner planets lap the outer ones.

📸 NASA's Picture of the Day

NASA Science

De Gerlache-Kocher massif looms on the visible horizon in this close-up of the edge of the Moon. The mountainous formation rises about 4 kilometers above its surroundings and is located very close to the lunar south pole. Boasting permanently shadowed crater floors that likely contain deposits of water ice and peaks that receive almost continuous sunlight for solar power generation, the south polar region is consider a prime location for the first human settlement on the Moon. In fact, De Gerlache-Kocher massif itself has been considered as a potential landing site for future crewed Artemis missions to the Moon. The remarkable telescopic image of the massif at the lunar limb was captured on October 31. Then, a favorable libration angle or lunar wobble enhanced this oblique view across the Moon's south pole.Tomorrow's picture: meteoric

See it on NASA APOD · A new one every day, courtesy of NASA. Free, and better than anything we could take ourselves.

🪐 The planets tonight

Elongation is the angle between a planet and the Sun. Below about 15° a planet is lost in the glare no matter how bright it is — which is why a brilliant Venus can still be impossible to see. Altitude is measured at its best moment tonight; anything under about 10° is fighting haze and rooftops.

✨ Constellations overhead tonight

Computed for your latitude and the current date, sampled through the dark hours. Southern constellations simply never rise from far north, and the reverse — which is why this list looks completely different in Sydney than in Stockholm.

☄ The asteroid threat board

Torino scale runs 0 to 10 and is the headline number: 0 means no hazard, 8 or above means a certain collision. Palermo scale is the specialists' measure — it compares an object's risk against the odds of a similar impact happening anyway over the same period. Negative means less likely than the background rate; below −2 means the risk is trivial. Every object NASA currently tracks sits at Torino 0. These lists exist precisely so that anything genuinely dangerous would be spotted decades out.