Live Satellite Tracker

A live satellite tracker shows where satellites are at this moment, rather than where they were when a picture was taken. This one draws every active satellite on a 3D globe and moves each one along its real orbit as you watch, so you can find the International Space Station, follow a Starlink train, watch the GPS constellation turn, or see which satellites are above your own horizon right now. It runs in the browser, needs no app or account, and is free.

Yes. Positions are computed from the latest published orbit of each satellite, several times a second, for the current moment; nothing is a recording. The orbits themselves are refreshed from CelesTrak every few hours, and the clock in the corner shows the time being drawn, so you always know what "now" means. You can also run the clock forward to see where everything will be later tonight.

The tracker on this page is following 16,625 active satellites right now. That is the working fleet: satellites still in use, as listed by CelesTrak from the public US Space Force catalogue. Well over half of them belong to one network, SpaceX's Starlink. On top of the working satellites, thousands of dead ones, spent rocket stages and fragments are also tracked in orbit; the brightest of those are shown here too.

Each satellite's orbit is published as a short set of numbers called orbital elements, measured by radar and telescopes and refreshed several times a day. Your browser feeds those numbers into SGP4, the standard model for predicting where a satellite is, and redraws every dot many times a second. For a satellite in low orbit the result is typically within a few kilometres of its true position, close enough to say which city it is flying over. Nothing is simulated: every dot is a real object where it really is.

It is marked on the globe and labelled: tap it to see its height, speed and the place it is passing over. The station circles Earth about every 93 minutes at around 28,000 km/h (17,500 mph), so it crosses a continent in minutes. Its orbit is tilted 51.6 degrees to the equator, which means it passes over everywhere between 51.6 degrees north and 51.6 degrees south, most of the inhabited world.

Yes, without a telescope. Press "Over me" on the tracker and allow your location (or pick a place) to get tonight's visible passes for your sky. A satellite is visible when you are in darkness but it, hundreds of kilometres up, is still in sunlight, so the good passes come in the hour or two after sunset and before sunrise. The space station looks like a very bright, steady white light that crosses the sky in a few minutes. It does not blink: a blinking light is an aircraft.

For a satellite in low orbit, such as the space station, the position is usually within a few kilometres of the truth, which at the scale of the globe is smaller than a dot. Accuracy depends on how fresh the orbit data is: a set of orbital elements a day old is very good, a week old drifts by a few minutes along the track. This tracker refreshes its orbits every few hours and tells you if they have gone stale. Pass times for your location are typically within a few seconds of the professional predictors.

Yes. Every Starlink satellite in the public catalogue is on the globe, more than 11,000 of them, and the layers menu can show Starlink on its own or hide it. To watch a newly launched Starlink train pass over you, use "Over me": the train shows up as a run of passes a minute or two apart in the evening or before dawn.

Starlink provides internet from low orbit, about 550 km up. A satellite that low sees only a small patch of ground, so covering the planet takes thousands of them, arranged in many rings. Each launch releases a few dozen at once; for the first days they follow each other closely, which is the "train" of lights people report, and then they spread out as they climb to their working height. On the globe you can see the rings as lines of dots. Use the filter to show Starlink alone, or to hide it.

They are three neighbourhoods, by height. Low Earth orbit, below 2,000 km, holds the space stations, Starlink and most Earth-watching satellites; one lap takes about 90 to 120 minutes. Medium orbit, around 20,000 km, is where the navigation satellites fly (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS, BeiDou), lapping the planet about twice a day. Geostationary orbit is a single ring 35,786 km above the equator, where a satellite takes exactly one day per lap and so hangs over the same spot: that is where the weather satellites and TV satellites sit.

The list on this page shows the comets predicted to be brightest today, with how far each is from Earth and from the Sun. Zoom out on the tracker to see where they are and the path each is following. Brightness uses the astronomers' magnitude scale, where a smaller number is brighter: about 6 is the limit of the naked eye under a dark sky, and about 10 needs good binoculars or a small telescope. The figures are predictions from each comet's orbit, and comets are famously unpredictable, so treat them as a guide.

The flybys listed on this page are all safe passes. They come from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which computes the orbit of every known near-Earth asteroid, and the distance shown is how far each one stays from Earth at its closest. Distances are given in kilometres and in lunar distances, one lunar distance being the average gap between Earth and the Moon, about 384,400 km. Small asteroids pass inside the Moon's orbit many times a year and most are found only days before.

Yes, and it is free. Press "Embed" on the tracker, choose a size and what it should open on (the whole sky, the International Space Station, Starlink only, and so on), and copy the code into your page, blog post or classroom site. The live 3D globe then runs there with the same real-time positions, kept up to date by us. The code includes a short credit line under the tracker linking back to this page; please leave it in place.

Because space is mostly empty. Satellites sit within a few Earth widths, the Moon is 30 Earth widths away, and a comet can be tens of thousands. Drawn to scale, you would see either the satellites or the comets, never both. So out to the geostationary ring everything is at true scale, and beyond it distance is compressed more and more, with labelled rings to show how far you are looking. Directions stay true: a comet is drawn in the direction it really lies from Earth.