Sky Map is the app people install the first time they hold a phone up at a bright dot and wonder whether it is a planet. It labels the stars, constellations and planets overhead and lets you slide the clock to see what is coming. We built Nightfield, a free interactive night sky that runs right here in your browser. Pick your city, drag the sky around, tap a star to learn about it, and hunt for the three targets we set every evening. No install, no signup.
Explore the sky now
The sky opens on tonight’s first target with a pulsing arrow pointing at it. Drag to look around, pinch or scroll to zoom, and tap any star or planet.
How to use it
Nightfield starts from the time zone your browser reports, so it usually opens on your own city. If it guessed wrong, open the Place tab and pick another city or drag the latitude slider. It never asks for your location, and it makes no network requests.
Drag to look around. Pinch, scroll or press plus and minus to zoom. On a keyboard the arrow keys pan and the square brackets move the clock an hour at a time. Tap an object and a card gives its constellation, brightness, distance where we are confident of it, and a short plain-English fact.
The Time tab plays the sky forward at up to six hours per second, or jumps by an hour or a day. The Layers tab switches constellation lines, names, a compass grid and planets, and has a red night-vision mode that keeps your eyes dark-adapted.
The daily quest gives you three targets, such as Vega or Jupiter. Find them in order and your streak grows. Streaks and settings are saved on your device only, and nothing leaves your browser.
How it compares to Sky Map
The Android app is best known for one trick: it reads your phone’s compass and motion sensors, so the sky on screen follows wherever you point the phone. A browser page cannot do that without asking for sensor permissions, and we chose not to ask. In Nightfield you steer with your finger instead of your wrist.
What carries over is the core job: real sky positions for your place and time, labelled objects, and a way to run time forward. Nightfield holds about 175 of the brightest stars, 33 constellation figures, the Sun, the Moon and the five planets you can see without a telescope.
Accuracy is worth being clear about. Nightfield uses low-precision astronomy formulas, which put the planets and Moon within a fraction of a degree of true positions. That is plenty for learning the sky and finding things by eye, and it is not enough for aiming a telescope at a faint target or predicting an occultation. It also has no satellite passes, deep-sky objects or comets.
Use Nightfield for a quick check before you step outside, or to learn what tonight’s bright objects are. Get the real app when you want the sky to track your phone in the dark.
Get the full app
Sky Map is free on Android, was originally built at Google, and is now an open-source project. If you want more choice, we compared the field in our guide to the best stargazing and astronomy apps for Android.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use Sky Map in a browser?
Not the Android app itself. Nightfield is our browser-based take on the same idea: a live sky for your city with labelled stars and planets. You steer by dragging, because a web page cannot follow your phone’s compass without sensor permissions.
Is this the real Sky Map?
No. Nightfield is an original tool we built, inspired by the sky-labelling idea in Sky Map. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Sky Map developers or Google. For the full app with sensor tracking, get Sky Map from the stores above.
Does Nightfield ask for your location?
No. It reads only the time zone your browser reports to guess a nearby city, and you can change the city or latitude yourself. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the page works offline once loaded.
How accurate is the sky?
Accurate enough for learning and casual stargazing. Star positions come from an embedded catalogue and planets and the Moon from simplified orbit formulas. Expect errors of a fraction of a degree, which is well under the width of your thumb held at arm’s length.
Is Nightfield free?
Yes, completely. There is no signup and no limit on use. Your streak, place and layer settings are stored in your browser’s local storage on your device.
