The sky’s top 10s
The brightest, the nearest, the fastest, the reddest, the biggest: stars, clusters, nebulae and galaxies ranked from StarsMenu’s own data — and for each one, whether it is up tonight from your place.
Tonight’s specials
Worked out for your place and tonight.
Stars
From the 8,920 stars of magnitude 6.5 or brighter in the HYG database.
Deep sky
From the 228 brightest and best-known clusters, nebulae and galaxies in the StarsMenu catalog.
How these lists are made
Each list is worked out in your browser from the same data the rest of StarsMenu uses: the 8,920 stars of the HYG database that are brighter than magnitude 6.5 — magnitudes, colours, distances and motions measured by the Hipparcos satellite — and the StarsMenu catalog of deep-sky objects from OpenNGC and d3-celestial. Nothing is copied from someone else’s ranking, so the order can differ a little from lists you may have seen; each list says how it is made.
Two stars closer than one arcminute look like a single point to the eye, so they count as one, with their light added together — this is why α Centauri, a pair of stars, is third among the brightest. The “tonight” marks use the same rules as the Tonight menu: high enough above your horizon while the sky is dark enough for that object.