Eight planets, one star, and a great many rocks that have not hit us yet. Everything below is computed from real orbital mechanics — nothing here is decorative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Planet positions computed in your browser from JPL approximate ephemerides. Asteroid data from NASA/JPL Sentry and the close-approach database. More sky: Solar Outbreak Watch · Golden Hour & Night Sky · Global Hazard Watch
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