How to find Orion and its belt, with times for 13 cities

To find Orion, look for its belt: three stars of about the same brightness in a short, straight row, with an orange star, Betelgeuse, on one side and a blue-white one, Rigel, on the other. On November and December evenings the belt comes up in the east. By January it's already well up in the east-south-east as the sky gets dark, and from February to April it swings across the south and down into the west. From the northern hemisphere Orion stands upright when he's due south; from Australia he's on his head.

How to find Orion's belt

The belt is three stars, Alnitak, Alnilam and Mintaka, evenly spaced in a line about as long as five full Moons side by side. That's also three widths of your little finger held at arm's length (a pinky covers about 1 degree).

Once you have the belt, the rest of Orion hangs off it. Four bright stars make a tall hourglass with the belt as its waist: Betelgeuse, the orange one, and Bellatrix are the shoulders, and blue-white Rigel and Saiph are the feet. Betelgeuse to Rigel is about three-quarters of the span from your thumb to your little finger with your hand stretched out at arm's length.

Which way up he sits depends on when you look. Seen from the northern hemisphere, Orion comes up in the east lying on his side, so the belt points almost straight up, with Betelgeuse to its left and Rigel to its right. A few hours later, in the south, he's standing, Betelgeuse at the upper left and Rigel at the lower right.

East works everywhere because the belt sits almost exactly on the celestial equator, the sky's own equator above Earth's. Anything on that line rises due east and sets due west wherever you live. That's why both hemispheres get Orion, and why from Reykjavík to Sydney he comes up within a few degrees of due east.

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A closer look

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Night sky facing south over dark hills marked SE, S and SW, with thin constellation lines. Orion stands upright just left of centre: labelled Betelgeuse at the upper left, labelled Rigel at the lower right, and three stars slanting between them with a few faint dots below. Sirius is labelled at the lower left with Adhara beneath it, Procyon far left, Aldebaran upper right, and a small knot of stars sits at the top edge.

The stars in Orion and their names

Star	Where, with Orion upright	Colour	Magnitude
Rigel	Lower right, a foot	Blue-white	0.18
Betelgeuse	Upper left, a shoulder	Orange-red	0.45
Bellatrix	Upper right, a shoulder	Blue-white	1.64
Alnilam	Middle of the belt	Blue-white	1.69
Alnitak	Left end of the belt	Blue-white	1.74
Saiph	Lower left, a foot	Blue-white	2.07
Mintaka	Right end of the belt	Blue-white	2.25

They only look like a group from here. Betelgeuse is a red supergiant about 700 light-years away and Rigel a blue supergiant about 860 light-years away, so the light you see from Betelgeuse tonight set off around the 14th century.

Betelgeuse also changes. In late 2019 it dimmed so sharply that some scientists wondered if it was heading for a supernova. NASA's explanation is that the star threw off a burst of material that cooled into a cloud of dust and blocked some of its light, and by April 2020 it was back to its usual brightness.

When can you see Orion?

Every star rises about four minutes earlier each night, two hours a month, so Orion turns up earlier every evening from November on. "Ten degrees up" in the table means clear of most rooftops, though a hill or a tall building to the east will make you wait a little longer.

City	15 Nov	15 Dec	15 Jan	Highest on 15 Dec	How high
New York	8:51 PM	6:53 PM	22° at dusk	11:54 PM	48° S
Chicago	8:46 PM	6:48 PM	21° at dusk	11:49 PM	47° S
Denver	8:53 PM	6:55 PM	23° at dusk	11:58 PM	49° S
Los Angeles	8:42 PM	6:44 PM	27° at dusk	11:51 PM	55° S
San Diego	8:36 PM	6:38 PM	28° at dusk	11:46 PM	56° S
San Francisco	9:01 PM	7:03 PM	24° at dusk	12:07 AM	51° S
London	9:10 PM	7:12 PM	15° at dusk	11:59 PM	37° S
Berlin	9:18 PM	7:20 PM	14° at dusk	12:06 AM	36° S
Reykjavík	11:10 PM	9:12 PM	7:11 PM	1:27 AM	25° S
Bengaluru	9:01 PM	7:03 PM	39° at dusk	12:19 AM	76° S
Seoul	9:26 PM	7:28 PM	24° at dusk	12:32 AM	51° S
Tokyo	8:34 PM	6:36 PM	25° at dusk	11:42 PM	53° S
Sydney	9:40 PM	27° at dusk	50° at dusk	12:56 AM	57° N

Every time on this page comes from Orbit's engine, the astronomy inside my Mac app, run on 20 October 2026. I checked New York's sunset on 15 November (4:38 PM) against NASA JPL's Horizons, and Orion's highest moment that night against Horizons' sidereal clock; both agree to the minute.

How high Orion climbs depends only on your latitude, the same way the North Star's height does (how to find the North Star). Bengaluru gets him 76 degrees up, nearly overhead. London sees him reach only 37.

Being this close to the equator has a bonus: from 13 degrees north you miss only the stars closest to the sky's south pole, so over a year Bengaluru sees more of the sky than any other city in Orbit's menu (living with a real sky wallpaper has the numbers).

Where is Orion tonight?

In October Orion is for night owls and early risers. In the middle of the month the belt comes up around 11 PM, and by dawn it's high in the south-south-west. After that he turns up about two hours earlier each month, and this is where to look through the year.

Month	Once it's dark	Before dawn
October	Not up yet; rises around 11 PM	High in the south-south-west
November	Not up yet; 10° up in the east around 9 PM	Low in the west-south-west
December	Rising in the east; 10° up around 7 PM	Just set in the west
January	Already up in the east-south-east	Set
February	High in the south-south-east	Set
March	High in the south-south-west	Set
April	Lower in the west-south-west	Set
May	Gone into the evening twilight	Not up
June and July	Hidden in the Sun's glare	Hidden in the Sun's glare
August	Not up until the small hours	Back, low in the east
September	Not up until after midnight	High in the south-south-east

Bengaluru has Orion in the same directions, only higher, and keeps him in the evening sky until mid-May. Sydney keeps him until early June; Australia gets its own section below.

Orion also gives his name to a meteor shower. Every October the Orionids seem to fly out of a spot about 10 degrees north-east of Betelgeuse, so they're best before dawn, when Orion is high. The 2026 peak comes on the night of 21 to 22 October, going by the International Meteor Organization's calendar.

Gemini is Orion's neighbour to the north-east, and its meteor shower is best on the night of 13 to 14 December in the Americas and Europe, with Orion up most of the night (when to watch the Geminids). Later on those December evenings a "star" much brighter than any in Orion comes up in the east-north-east, to his left. That's Jupiter, rising around 9:30 PM in New York in mid-December, with fainter, orange Mars following it up (the Mars and Jupiter pairing).

How to use Orion's belt to find Sirius and the Pleiades

The belt is a pointer that works both ways, as EarthSky's version of the trick shows. With Orion in the south, follow the belt down and to the left for about a spread hand's width and you reach Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, about 8.6 light-years away. The belt points almost straight at it.

Follow the belt up and to the right the same distance to Aldebaran, an orange star sitting a little above the line, and keep going about half as far again to the Pleiades. That little knot of stars is an open cluster about 445 light-years away with over a thousand stars in it. The London picture above has all of it.

While Orion is still rising in the east, the belt stands almost upright and Aldebaran and the Pleiades sit straight above it. Sirius comes up later: about two hours after the belt from New York, nearer two and a half from London, and an hour and a quarter from Bengaluru.

Can you see the Orion Nebula with the naked eye?

Yes, if the sky is dark enough. It sits in the sword, the short line of fainter stars hanging below the belt, and NASA's Night Sky Network says it's easy to see with the naked eye under moderately dark skies. To the eye it looks like a fuzzy star. Binoculars show more of the glow, and a small telescope picks out the Trapezium, four stars at its heart.

What you're looking at is a cloud of gas and dust about 24 light-years across, roughly 1,500 light-years away. Orion's bright stars get through city glow, but the nebula mostly doesn't, and moonlight washes it out too. Aim for the nights around the new Moons, which in 2026 fall in the second week of November and of December. The full Moons of late November and late December are both supermoons, lovely in their own right and no help at all here.

Why is Orion upside down in Australia?

Australians face north to see him, the opposite way to someone in London facing south, so the whole figure comes out turned half a turn. Rigel is on top, Betelgeuse at the bottom, and the sword sits above the belt instead of hanging below it. Australians call the belt and sword the Saucepan, and Jake Clark, an astronomer at the University of Southern Queensland, told ScienceAlert that it looks like "a big old cooking pot".

So from Australia, look east as Orion comes up and north when he's highest, about 57 degrees up from Sydney, a little more than halfway to overhead. Sydney has him in the evening from mid-November to early June.

⊕ Inspect the image

A closer look

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Night sky over Sydney facing east, with thin constellation lines and hills marked NE, E and SE. Left of centre, Orion appears upside down: labelled Rigel at the top, three unlabelled belt stars below it and labelled Betelgeuse lower still. Sirius is labelled to the right, a little lower than the belt, with Aldebaran at the left edge, Canopus high on the right and Procyon low in the middle.

Orion on your Mac's desktop

Orbit, my Mac app, draws the real sky over one of 13 cities, or your own location, behind your desktop icons. Set Facing to East on a November evening and Orion comes up from behind the hills along the bottom of the screen (the same three hills for every city, not your skyline). With Labels on the Sky on, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Sirius and Aldebaran get their names.

It has limits. The belt stars are a touch too faint for a label, this version writes no constellation names on the sky, and it draws neither the nebula nor meteors, so its sword is a short line of faint dots. The constellation lines are hairlines that stop short of each star, because when I first built the sky they came out louder than the stars.

The sky turns about four pixels a minute on a 1080p screen, so you won't catch Orion climbing, but look up after an hour and he has.

Orbit is $6.99 once on the Mac App Store (₹699 in India), with no subscription, for macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon and Intel Macs, and you can see what it looks like on the Mac page.