Free tool — no signup
What Stars Can I See Tonight?
Enter your US city and get the brightest named stars visible overhead this evening — drawn from the HYG v4.2 catalog, filtered for your exact latitude, weighted for the current season.
About the star magnitude visibility tool
The star magnitude visibility tool is a free utility that shows which named stars are bright enough to see from any major US city tonight. Enter your city — Boston, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, Anchorage, or any of 56 covered metros — and the tool returns 8 to 12 brightest stars visible from that latitude with their apparent magnitudes from the HYG v4.2 catalog, their cardinal directions, and the best viewing time. Light-pollution context (Bortle scale) is included along with the nearest International Dark Sky Park where fainter stars become visible. The tool uses latitude-based filtering against J2000 declinations to surface only the stars actually above the horizon at the city's latitude tonight. Free to use, no signup. Star maps showing the exact sky above your chosen city are at /design from $12.
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Frequently asked questions
How does the star magnitude visibility tool work?+
Enter a US city — Boston, Los Angeles, Denver, Houston, Anchorage, or any of the 56 covered metros — and the tool returns 8 to 12 of the brightest named stars visible from that latitude tonight. It draws from the HYG v4.2 stellar catalog (the standard naked-eye reference), filters out stars permanently below your horizon, and weights the list by seasonal prominence: stars whose constellations are well-placed in the evening sky for the current month come first.
Which stars are bright enough to see from a US city?+
Under typical US city skies (Bortle 6 to 8, where the Milky Way is invisible), only stars at magnitude 4 or brighter are reliably naked-eye. That includes roughly 200 named stars across the whole sky and about 20 to 30 visible on any given clear night from a single latitude. The tool restricts itself to magnitudes brighter than 2.0 — the unambiguous, can't-miss-them stars that punch through urban glow.
Why is the list different from city to city?+
Latitude is the dominant variable for naked-eye star visibility. Canopus (magnitude -0.74, second-brightest in the sky) is visible from Miami at 25 degrees north but permanently below the horizon for anyone north of about 37 degrees — so Boston, Seattle, and Chicago never see it. Polaris is straightforwardly the opposite. The tool uses each city's exact latitude from our catalog to filter the list.
What is the Bortle scale and why does it matter?+
The Bortle scale (1 to 9) classifies night-sky darkness, where Bortle 1 is a pristine wilderness site and Bortle 9 is inner-city sky glow. Most US metros sit between Bortle 6 and Bortle 8: the Milky Way is invisible, fainter constellations are hard to recognize, and only stars of magnitude 4 or brighter are reliably seen. To see fainter stars and the Milky Way arch you typically need a Bortle 1 to 3 site — usually a National Park or designated International Dark Sky Park within a few hours of driving.
Is this tool accurate enough to plan stargazing?+
It's a directional starting point, not a planetarium. The tool uses J2000 declinations (within arc-minutes of current epoch) and a simplified seasonal bucketing rather than computing local sidereal time per minute. For a precise altitude-azimuth view at a specific time on a specific date, generate a star map at /design — the configurator runs the IAU 2006 sidereal time algorithm and renders the exact sky overhead at the time you choose.