Which planets you can see from India this winter, and when to look

If you step outside in India this evening, the only bright planet you will find is Saturn, high in the south-east after dark. The others are morning planets for now. In the hour before sunrise in mid-November, four of them are up together: Venus blazing low in the east, Mercury below it and to the left in the brightening twilight, and Jupiter and Mars side by side high in the south-east. On 16 November those last two are only 1.2 degrees apart, about two and a half times the width of the full Moon.

The times below are our calculations for Delhi. Other cities see the same planets in the same order. Rising and setting times shift with longitude: in Mumbai and Ahmedabad add about half an hour, in Kolkata take off about half an hour, and in Guwahati take off about 50 minutes.

Which planets are visible tonight in India?

In the evening, Saturn. It is up as the sky darkens and stays up until after 3 am in mid-November, setting earlier each night: around 2:15 am by 1 December and around midnight by New Year. Through any small telescope it looks unusual this season. Earth passed through the plane of Saturn’s rings in March 2025, and the rings are still tilted only about 6 degrees towards us, so they appear as a thin bright line rather than the familiar open ellipse.

Jupiter and Mars join after midnight, and Venus and Mercury only in the last hour or two before sunrise. If you are up early anyway, for school or work or the Leonid meteor shower, the pre-dawn sky is where the show is.

Mars and Jupiter side by side, 15 to 18 November

Mars and Jupiter pass each other in mid-November in the constellation Leo. Our calculation puts them closest at about 7:30 am IST on 16 November, after sunrise, so the mornings of 15, 16 and 17 November look almost the same: two bright points, one cream and one orange, about 1.2 degrees apart and some 63 degrees up in the south-east at 5 am. Regulus, Leo’s brightest star, sits just below them. The radiant of the Leonid meteor shower is less than ten degrees away, so anyone out for the Leonids on 18 November gets the planets too.

Venus and Mercury before sunrise

Venus is the brilliant object low in the east before dawn. It rises around 4:20 am in Delhi in mid-November and earlier as the weeks pass, reaching its greatest brilliancy, magnitude −4.9, on 27 November. It keeps climbing away from the Sun until its greatest western elongation on 3 to 4 January 2027, when it stands 47 degrees from the Sun and rises at about 3:40 am.

Mercury is harder. It reaches its greatest distance from the Sun in the morning sky on 21 November, 19.6 degrees away. At 6:15 am that day it is about 12 degrees up in the east-south-east as seen from Delhi, below and to the left of Venus. You need a flat, clear eastern horizon. Binoculars help, but only before the Sun rises: never sweep binoculars near the Sun.

When the Moon joins the planets

• 30 November, before dawn: the waning gibbous Moon is about 5° from Jupiter at 5 am.
• 1 December, before dawn: the Moon has moved on to sit about 5° from Mars.
• 24 January 2027, before dawn: the Moon and Jupiter are about 2° apart, about 45° up in the west at 5 am.

February 2027: Jupiter and Mars at their best

Through the winter Jupiter and Mars rise earlier each evening. Jupiter reaches opposition, the point where Earth passes between it and the Sun, at 5:47 am IST on 11 February 2027. It will then be 652 million km away, at magnitude −2.6, and up all night. Mars follows with its own opposition at 9:14 pm IST on 19 February and comes closest to Earth the next morning, at 101.4 million km. That is a little farther than at its previous close approach in January 2025, so Mars will appear 13.8 arcseconds across in a telescope, small but enough to show its polar cap and darker markings under steady air. At magnitude −1.2 it will outshine every star except Sirius.

How to see Jupiter’s moons with binoculars

Jupiter’s four large moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, were discovered by Galileo in 1610 with a telescope weaker than most modern binoculars. They shine at magnitudes between about 4.6 and 5.7, bright enough to see if Jupiter’s glare were not so close. Steady binoculars of 7×50 or 10×50, braced on a wall or a car roof or mounted on a tripod, will show up to four tiny points in a line on either side of the planet. Io circles Jupiter in under two days and Callisto in under 17, so the pattern changes every night. One of them, Europa, hides an ocean under its ice that a NASA spacecraft is on its way to study.

• Look before dawn now, and in the evening from January. The higher Jupiter stands, the steadier the view.
• Brace the binoculars. Hand shake smears the moons into Jupiter’s glare far more than you would expect.
• Not every moon is always visible. On some nights one passes in front of Jupiter or behind it, and you will count three, or even two.
• Through a small telescope the moons are easy, and Jupiter’s two main cloud belts show as dark bands.

How we worked this out

All positions, rising and setting times, magnitudes and dates are our calculations with the open-source Astronomy Engine library (version 2.1.19) for central Delhi, unless another city is named. Rise and set times assume a flat horizon and are rounded to the minute. Conjunction separations are geocentric unless a time of morning is given, in which case they are for Delhi at that time. Opposition dates match published almanacs: Jupiter on 11 February and Mars on 19 February 2027. The moon positions in the chart come from the same library’s model of the Galilean satellites.

Sources

• Astronomy Engine, open-source astronomy calculation library
• NASA Science: Jupiter’s moons
• NASA Science: Saturn