Five of the Sun's planets shine bright enough to see with no equipment at all: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. People have tracked them by eye for thousands of years, which is why they carry the names of gods and not catalog numbers. Uranus and Neptune are out there too, but they sit at the edge of human sight and need binoculars or a telescope. Which of the bright five are above your horizon tonight comes down to where each one sits in its orbit, and that is exactly what the live map resolves.
The quickest tell: planets do not twinkle
A star is a pinpoint so far away that our turbulent air bends its single ray around, and it flickers and twinkles. A planet is close enough to show a tiny disk, and the air cannot smear a disk the same way, so a planet shines with a steady, calm light. If a bright point is holding rock steady while the stars around it shimmer, you are almost certainly looking at a planet.
The five, and how each one looks
Venus is the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon, a brilliant white point low in the west after sunset or in the east before dawn, which is why it is called the evening star and the morning star. Jupiter is the next brightest, a steady cream colored beacon that holds its own high in the sky. Mars is unmistakably reddish, the color that named it the red planet. Saturn is a calmer, golden point, fainter than Jupiter and easy to mistake for a star until you notice it will not twinkle. Mercury is the hardest, a quick point that only shows low in the glow of dawn or dusk for a short stretch at a time, never far from the Sun.
Where to look, and when
The planets never stray far from a single line across the sky called the ecliptic, the same track the Sun and Moon follow, because the whole Solar System is nearly flat. Trace that arc from where the Sun went down and you are sweeping the exact band the planets live in. The evening planets hang in the west after sunset, the morning planets ride up in the east before dawn, and the ones in between climb the southern sky through the night.
The live positions over your sky
Which planets are up, how high they sit and which direction to face all change with the date, the hour and your location. The live instrument places every planet on a map of your own sky right now, so you can walk outside, face the right way and name what you are looking at instead of guessing.
Catch the nights the planets line up.
A few times a year two or three planets draw close into a conjunction, or one sits right beside the Moon. Those are the nights worth stepping outside for, and they pass in a day or two. Magna Earth tracks the geometry over your coordinates and tells you when a pairing is tight enough to be worth the walk to a dark corner of the yard.
Get the conjunction alerts — from $14/mo