Visible passes

The International Space Station

Bright enough to see with no equipment at all, from almost anywhere on Earth — but only in the couple of hours after dusk and before dawn. Here is when, from your city.

The station orbits 423 km up at 7.66 km/s, going right round the Earth every 93.0 minutes — sixteen sunrises a day for the people aboard. Its orbit is tilted 51.6°, so it passes over everywhere between those latitudes and never over the poles.

You see it by reflected sunlight, which is why it is only visible in twilight: the sky where you are standing has to be dark, while the station 420 km higher is still catching the Sun. It looks like a bright star moving steadily across the sky, with no flashing lights and no sound. Passes last a few minutes, and often it fades out halfway across rather than setting — that is the moment it crosses into Earth's shadow.

Altitude: 423 km
Speed: 7.66 km/s
Orbit: 93.0 min
Inclination: 51.63°
In sunlight: 70% of each orbit

Latitude: 29.91° N
Longitude: 117.22° E
Altitude: 422.8 km
Speed: 7.661 km/s
Sunlight: in sunlight
Time: —

Updated every second in your browser, propagated with SGP4 from orbital elements issued 11 hours ago — a position error of metres. Nothing is fetched while you watch: the elements are in this page. Solid brass is the next hour and a half of its path, dotted grey the last half hour. The dashed ring is everywhere the station is above the horizon at that moment — inside it you could see it, if it were dark and it were in sunlight. Shading is night on the ground; the faint bands top and bottom are the latitudes its 51.64° orbit never reaches. Coastlines are Natural Earth 1:110m.

Where it can be seen from

74 of the 86 cities on this site get at least one visible pass in the next five days. The rest are in the part of the cycle where every pass falls in daylight, which lasts a week or two and then reverses.

Belgium and the Netherlands

British Isles

Continental Europe

North America

Rest of the world

Why the station is not on the main map

The solar system simulation is drawn from above the ecliptic, with the Sun at the centre. On that map the station's orbit is a ring 6.6% wider than Earth itself — 6,791 km against a planet of 6,371 — so at any honest scale it is inside the dot. It also laps the planet every 92 minutes, which at the simulation's default rate is sixteen complete orbits per second of screen time: a smear, not a station.

More to the point, the question people actually ask is when will it go over my house, and a top-down heliocentric chart cannot answer that at any zoom. That is a question about the ground, so it gets a map of the ground.

Positions computed with SGP4 from two-line elements published by CelesTrak, issued 11 hours ago and refreshed hourly. Illumination and twilight come from the same ephemeris as the rest of the site. Element sets decay and the station manoeuvres, so predictions beyond a few days will shift.