The data shown here varies over the course of the year and also depends upon your geographic latitude. Please select the desired month and latitude using the links below:

| 80°S | 70°S | 60°S | 50°S | 40°S | 30°S | 20°S | 10°S | 00°N | 10°N | 20°N | 30°N | 40°N | 50°N | 60°N | 70°N | 80°N |
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |

The chart below lists the brightest galaxies, star clusters, nebulae and planetary nebulae which are observable from a latitude of 50°N on 1st Feb. The objects listed are the brightest members of the Messier and NGC catalogues, grouped by type and listed in order of brightness within each category. The horizontal scale represents the 24 hours of the day; the altitude of each object through the course of the day is indicated by a coloured line. A green line indicates that an object is more than 30° above the horizon – i.e. readily observable – an amber line indicates that an object is 15–30° above the horizon – i.e. likely to be subject to poor atmospheric conditions – and a red line indicates that an object is less than 15° above the horizon. No line is shown when an object is below the horizon. All deep sky objects rise almost exactly four minutes earlier each night, adding up to a shift of around an hour per month. Charts are available for each month of the year and for a range of other latitudes using the links above.

The times shown do not depend upon your longitude. For every 15° further west that you live, astronomical objects rise and set an hour later, but since the Sun also rises and sets an hour later, your timezone will be an hour later. The times shown here are expressed in local mean time, which closely approximates your local time. More specifically, it assumes that you use Greenwich mean time (GMT) if you live on the Greenwich meridian, or that your timezone adds or subtracts an hour for every 15° east or west. In practice, your timezone probably doesn't exactly match your longitude, and these times may differ by 30–60 minutes from the civil time that your country keeps. For example, in the summer the UK keeps British Summer Time (BST; GMT+1h), whereas the times shown here continue to indicate GMT for an observer on the Greenwich meridian. In this example, if the table below were to read 12:00, the event would actually be observed at 13:00 BST.

The data for this chart was computed from the NGC2000.0 catalogue and plotted using PyXPlot.