ISS Tracker
ISS, Tiangong and Hubble live on a map: ground track, visibility footprint, day-night terminator and pass predictions for your city.
Passes over your city
Pick a city or tap "Near me" — we will list every pass for the next 5 days and highlight the ones you can see with the naked eye.
| Date | Rise | Max | Set | Elevation | Direction | Duration | Visibility |
|---|
Elevation is the angle above the horizon at the highest point (90° is straight overhead). Direction shows where the satellite rises and where it sets. A pass is visible when it is already dark for you while the satellite is still lit by the Sun.
How the ISS tracker works
The station does not beam its position down to us. Ground radars and optical stations measure its orbit regularly and publish it as a TLE (two-line element set): two lines of orbital parameters — inclination, eccentricity, mean motion and the epoch they refer to. From those, the SGP4 model can compute where the satellite is at any moment to within a few kilometres. That is exactly what this page does: the TLE comes from the server, while the position, the ±45-minute ground track, the radio-visibility footprint and the day-night line are computed in your browser every second, with no further requests.
Pass predictions are built for the location you pick: we step through the next 5 days and look for intervals when the satellite climbs above 10° over the horizon. Elevation is the angle at the highest point: 10–20° is low over the rooftops, 45° and above is nearly overhead — bright and long. Direction tells you where the satellite appears and where it disappears. To actually see the station two things must be true at once: it is already twilight for you (the Sun more than 6° below the horizon) while the station, 400 km up, is still in sunlight — it has no light of its own and only reflects the Sun. Such passes carry the "visible" badge; the rest happen in daylight or in Earth's shadow.
The orbital elements come from Celestrak (NORAD / US Space Force data); the snapshot is refreshed every 6 hours, which keeps the error for a low-orbit station within a couple of kilometres. Pass times are shown in your browser's time zone. The ISS flies at about 420 km, moving at roughly 28,000 km/h and completing an orbit every 93 minutes — 16 orbits a day; a single pass takes it across your sky in 4–7 minutes. Tiangong flies slightly lower and looks a little fainter, while Hubble at 540 km is only visible from low latitudes.