10 free sky tools for families

Free tools for knowing what's up. Three are ours, and they say so; the rest are other people's that we would use ourselves.

How it's ordered: Free with no account, then most useful for a family on a school night first.

Sky Tonight (ours) · Ours. A ZIP, three boxes and one card: what to look for tonight, which way, how high, read aloud. Nothing leaves the phone.
NASA What's Up. NASA's monthly skywatching video and transcript: what to look for this month, in plain words.
American Meteor Society calendar. The peak nights and rates of every shower, the source our verdicts use.
Stellarium Web. A free planetarium in the browser: drag the sky around to see any time and place. Busy for small children, great for older ones.
The Moon calendar (ours) · Ours. Every night's Moon drawn, fourteen months, with a journal to print.
NASA Spot the Station. When the International Space Station passes over your town, a bright moving dot. Our table does no satellites; this does.
NASA Space Place. NASA's own site for kids: explainers, games and crafts about the solar system.
Seven Nights of Sky (ours) · Ours. One thing to find each night for a week, ticked off on the phone.
NASA eclipse pages. Where and when the next eclipses are, and how to watch safely.
A planisphere. Not an app: a cardboard star wheel you turn to the date and time. No screen, so no lost night eyes.

Rows marked Ours are Peabody's own pages and tools. We list them because they fit, and we say so.

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“Lists are fun, but the best thing in the sky is the one you find yourself.”