Sky View Café (Originally written by Kerry Shetline)

Sky View Café is a Java applet that lets you use your web browser to see many types of astronomical information, in both graphical and numerical form. You can see which stars and planets will be out tonight in the sky above your home town, see how the next solar or lunar eclipse will look from Los Angeles, or find out when the Moon rose over Sydney on your birthday ten years ago. Sky View Café includes star charts, a 3-D orrery, displays of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, an astronomical event calendar, an ephemeris generator, and many other features.

Best of all, Sky View Café is free, and there's nothing you have to install to use the on-line web version. All you need is a compatible Java-enabled web browser, and you're ready to go.

sky view, southern horizon

A view of a southern horizon, using optional settings to display constellations, constellation names, star names, and planet names.

lunar eclipse lunar occultation of saturn solar eclipse

A lunar eclipse, 30 minutes before an occultation of Saturn, and a solar eclipse -- shown using the Moon - 4° Span option in the Sky View.


A view of the planets in their orbits using the Out to Pluto option of the Orbits View, and an orientation of approximately 67°. In addition, a more detailed view of the our immediate planetary neighborhood.
solar system out to pluto solar system out to mars

moons of saturn moons of jupiter
Saturn with its rings and five of its moons (left), and three of Jupiter's moons (above), with Europa eclipsed and the shadow of Io crossing the face of Jupiter.

An insolation chart, showing the patterns of day, twilight, and night throughout the course of a year, from a place within the Arctic circle. insolation chart

eclipse map 2017

The total eclipse of 2017. The Moon's shadow appears in the middle of the eastern United States.

To provide all of these features takes a large Java applet -- Sky View Café is around 460K (1.7M with data) in size. If you're using a modem, especially if you're connecting at 56K or less, you'll need to be patient for the applet to load. Future visits will often be much faster if your web browser has kept the applet cached. If you're fortunate enough to have a high-speed internet connection, you should be able to breeze right in.

The Sky View Café was originally written by Kerry Shetline. We add a lot of features.

Yes, I know Sky View Café might take a minute or two to load.
GO!

Nah. If I don't see something happen in three seconds,
I'll just figure the web site doesn't work.