Skies of other worlds

The Earth from the Moon

From the near side of the Moon the Earth never rises or sets: it hangs in one place while its phases come and go. The sky is black at noon, because there is no air to scatter the light.

The evening star of Mars

Just after sunset at Gale, the brightest point in the west is the Earth, with the Moon beside it. The blue glow over the hills is a Martian sunset: the dust lets blue light through best.

Phobos crosses the Sun

Mars's larger moon is too small to cover the Sun, so it crosses it as a dark disc in under a minute. Perseverance filmed one from here; the clock is set to the crossing the sky's own reckoning finds.

Under Titan's haze

Saturn never moves in Titan's sky, but you could not see it: the orange haze hides the stars and the planet. They are drawn faintly where they are. The colour is a picture of words, not a photograph.

Jupiter overhead

On the side of Europa that faces Jupiter, the giant planet fills a patch of sky twenty times as wide as the Moon looks to us, and it never moves. Its sister moons cross the black sky beside it.

Proxima b

The nearest planet of another star. Its red sun is three times as wide as ours looks to us, and two dazzling stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, shine in its sky. Almost everything here is modelled.

TRAPPIST-1 e

Its sister planets line up along one arc of the sky, some as wide as our Moon, where their measured transits put them. The planet's turning and the sky's colour are assumed.

Everything is drawn where it really is, from the HYG star database, the NASA Exoplanet Archive and the planets’ own orbits (astronomy-engine).