The sunlight hitting your face right now left the Sun about 8 minutes and 20 seconds ago. Jupiter's light takes the best part of an hour, and the light from Neptune set off around four hours before it reaches you. Those numbers change every second, because everything is moving, and the homepage and every planet page on this site now show them live, ticking as you watch.
Here's what they were at noon UTC on 29 September 2026, and how they're worked out.
The numbers today
| Distance from Earth | Light takes | |
|---|---|---|
| Sun | 149,863,145 km | 8 min 19.9 s |
| Mercury | 178,734,415 km | 9 min 56 s |
| Venus | 53,273,638 km | 2 min 58 s |
| Mars | 250,666,566 km | 13 min 56 s |
| Jupiter | 888,038,888 km | 49 min 22 s |
| Saturn | 1,262,368,567 km | 1 h 10 min |
| Uranus | 2,827,968,714 km | 2 h 37 min |
| Neptune | 4,320,048,578 km | 4 h 0 min |
| Pluto | 5,258,698,695 km | 4 h 52 min |
For the live versions, the homepage has the Sun and all seven planets ticking in a strip, and each planet's page, like Earth's, has its own right-now panel. The distances page puts the Sun, the Moon and every planet in one live table, with a page for each, like Mars, that says when it next comes closest.
A few things jump out. Mercury is the closest planet to the Sun and yet on this particular day it's further from us than the Sun is, because it's on the far side of it. Venus, meanwhile, is only 53 million km away and closing, heading for the point in late October where it passes between us and the Sun. Saturn is about as close as it gets all year, because it reaches opposition in early October, when Earth sits directly between it and the Sun.
Why the distance to the Sun changes
Earth's orbit is a slightly squashed circle with the Sun a little off center, so our distance swings over the year. In 2026 it runs from about 147.10 million km in early January, at perihelion, to about 152.10 million km in early July, at aphelion. That puts sunlight's trip somewhere between 8 minutes 11 seconds and 8 minutes 27 seconds depending on the month.
It surprises people that we're closest to the Sun in the northern winter. The seasons come from Earth's 23.44 degree tilt, which decides how high the Sun climbs in your sky and how long it stays up, and the few percent change in distance barely registers next to that.
Why the planets swing so much
The distances between us and the other planets change far more than the distance to the Sun, because both of us are moving. When Mars is on our side of the Sun it can come within about 55 million km, and when it's on the far side it's around 400 million km away, which is why the distance in the table only means anything for the moment it was measured. There's more on that one in How far is Mars from Earth.
The outer planets swing less in proportion, because Earth's orbit is small next to theirs. Neptune is about 30 times further from the Sun than we are, so whether we're on its side or the far side only nudges the total by about three percent.
How the site works it out
Every one of these numbers is calculated in your browser, the moment you load the page, from the same code that moves the planets in the 3D viewer.
Each planet's orbit is described by six numbers, its orbital elements: how big the orbit is, how stretched, how tilted, which way it's turned, and where the planet was along it at a starting date. JPL publishes a set of these, along with how fast each one drifts per century, that's good for the years 1800 to 2050. For any date and time, the code rolls the elements forward, solves Kepler's equation to find where the planet is along its orbit, and turns that into a position in space around the Sun. Do that for Earth and for the other planet, measure the gap, and you have the distance.
Light time is then just the distance divided by the speed of light, 299,792.458 km per second. The page updates ten times a second, and since the distances change by anything up to tens of kilometers each second, you can watch the numbers tick over.
How accurate is it? Within a few arcminutes of the true positions for the outer planets and better than that for the inner ones. An arcminute is about a thirtieth of the width of the full Moon, so to the eye the planets are exactly where the numbers say. It's not what you'd navigate a spacecraft with, that takes JPL's full numerical ephemerides, but it's more than enough to tell you how far away something is, and because the viewer and the pages share the code, they always agree.
Looking back in time
The part I like most is what light time really means. When you look at Jupiter tonight you're seeing it as it was about 49 minutes ago, and Neptune as it was four hours ago. The further out you look the older the picture gets, and by the time you're looking at the stars in the galaxy map, most of that light left before you were born.
Every number on the site is a little window into how far that light has had to come. I find that more interesting than any single fact about the planets themselves.