How to See the ISS from Earth: A Simple Spotting Guide

The International Space Station is the third brightest object in the night sky after the Moon and Venus. Because it is huge and covered in reflective solar panels, it catches sunlight and shines like a slow, steady star gliding overhead. The best part is that you need no equipment at all. Your eyes are enough.

Why you can see it

The ISS does not make its own light. You see it because its solar arrays reflect the Sun back at you. That is why sightings only happen in the hour or two after sunset or before sunrise. During those windows the sky where you stand is already dark, but the station, orbiting about 420 kilometers up, is still bathed in sunlight. Our live dashboard shows this as the DAYLIGHT and ECLIPSED state on the map.

What it looks like

People often mistake their first sighting for an airplane, but the ISS is easy to tell apart:

• It is a single point of light, bright and steady, with no blinking or colored strobes.
• It moves smoothly and quickly, crossing a large part of the sky in about three to five minutes.
• It usually travels roughly from west to east, and it can fade out mid-pass when it flies into Earth's shadow.

How to plan a sighting

The station passes over most locations several times a day, but only some of those passes happen during the dark-sky, sunlit-station window. To find a good one:

1. Check a pass predictor such as NASA's free "Spot the Station" service, which can email or text you before a visible pass over your city.
2. Note the start time, the direction to look, and the maximum height above the horizon. Higher passes are brighter and last longer.
3. Get somewhere with an open view and let your eyes adjust for a few minutes.
4. Start watching a minute early and look toward the direction the predictor gave you.

Tips for a better view

A pass that climbs high overhead will be much brighter than one that skims the horizon. Clear skies matter more than darkness, so a bright pass is still easy to see from a city. If you want to know exactly where the station is at any moment, our real-time ground track map shows its position, and the altitude it is flying at. Once you have seen it cross the sky, it is hard to stop looking up.