How to see the International Space Station tonight
The space station is the easiest satellite to see with your own eyes. Here is when it is visible, where to look, what it looks like, and why it sometimes vanishes in the middle of the sky.
Updated
The International Space Station is about the size of a football field, flies some 400 km (250 miles) above the ground, and circles the Earth roughly every hour and a half. When it passes over you at the right time, it is brighter than any star in the sky. You need no telescope and no dark-sky site: a balcony in the middle of a city will do.
What it looks like
A steady, white point of light that glides across the sky in a few minutes.
- It does not blink. Flashing red, green or white lights mean an aeroplane.
- It makes no sound and leaves no trail.
- It moves much faster than an aeroplane at cruising height, and much slower than a meteor, which is gone in a second.
The station makes no light of its own. What you see is sunlight reflecting off its solar panels and body.
When you can see it
Three things have to be true at the same moment:
- The station is above your horizon. This site counts a pass from 10° up, because anything lower is usually hidden by buildings, trees and haze.
- Your sky is dark: the Sun is well below your horizon.
- The station is still in sunlight. It is so high that the Sun keeps shining on it for a while after sunset on the ground, and again before sunrise.
Together, those rules mean the station is visible in the hours after dusk and before dawn. In the middle of the night it usually flies through Earth's shadow and cannot be seen at all, even when it is directly overhead.
Visible passes also come in streaks. You may get a week or two of good evening passes, then a quiet spell, then a run of early-morning ones. This is normal: the station's orbit slowly drifts relative to the line between day and night.
How to find your next pass
Open the live flyover map. It uses your location to find your next visible passes, and replays each one across a chart of your own sky. There are also ready-made pages for hundreds of cities.
For each pass you get three moments:
| Moment | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Appears | When to be outside, and which direction to face |
| Highest | How far above the horizon the station climbs. 90° is straight overhead |
| Disappears | Where it sets, or where it fades out |
On the night
- Be outside two minutes early, facing the direction where the pass starts. The station is exactly on time.
- Favour high passes. One that climbs above 40° clears most buildings and trees, and the station is usually at its brightest when it is high, because that is when it is closest to you.
- Use your eyes. Binoculars and telescopes have too narrow a view to follow something this fast.
- Give a low pass a moment. Near the horizon the station is far away and dim. It brightens as it climbs.
Why it sometimes vanishes in mid-sky
On many evening passes the station does not reach the far horizon. It fades out high in the sky over a few seconds, sometimes turning orange first. That is the station flying into Earth's shadow: you are watching a sunset happen to a spacecraft.
Morning passes do the reverse. The station can appear out of nowhere well above the horizon as it comes out of the shadow into sunlight.
Can everyone see it?
Almost. The station's orbit is tilted 51.6° to the equator, so it passes directly over every place between 51.6° north and 51.6° south, which is where the great majority of people live. A little farther from the equator it can still be seen, lower in the sky toward the equator. Close to the poles it never rises high enough.
Two more to try
China's Tiangong space station is smaller and fainter than the ISS but easy to see on a good pass. The Hubble Space Telescope is fainter still, and its orbit only takes it over places within about 28.5° of the equator, so from farther away it stays low or below the horizon. The app predicts passes for both, and for Starlink trains.
