What you can see in the night sky without a telescope

Moving lights

• The International Space Station: the brightest satellite, a steady white light crossing the sky in a few minutes.
• China's Tiangong space station: a little fainter than the ISS, but easy to see on a good pass.
• Starlink trains: a line of satellites one after another, in the days after a launch.
• Other satellites: dozens of fainter points every evening from a dark site, a few from a city. Some flash briefly as a flat surface catches the Sun.
• Meteors: a streak lasting under a second. Showers such as the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December bring many per hour.

Telling them apart

• Aircraft blink and have red and green lights; satellites shine steadily and make no sound.
• Satellites move at a constant speed in a straight line, and may fade out partway as they enter the Earth's shadow.
• Planets don't shift against the stars over a single night, and they twinkle less than stars. Venus, low in the west after sunset or the east before sunrise, is the brightest thing in the sky after the Moon.

Planets you can spot

Five planets are visible to the naked eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter is very bright and creamy white, Mars has a reddish tint, Saturn is fainter and golden. Mercury only appears low in twilight. Which ones are up changes over the months.

Getting the most from a dark sky

Give your eyes 15 to 20 minutes away from screens and bright lights; your night vision keeps improving all that time. Use a red light if you need one. In a city, look for a spot shaded from streetlights; satellites and planets are bright enough to see anyway, while faint stars and the Milky Way need a dark site.