How to spot the International Space Station from your backyard

The International Space Station orbits Earth once every 92 minutes at an altitude of roughly 400 kilometres. It's the size of an American football field, its solar panels cover more than 2,500 square metres, and those panels reflect a surprising amount of sunlight straight back at us. When conditions are right, the ISS becomes the third-brightest object in the entire night sky — outshone only by the Sun and the Moon, and easily brighter than any planet or star. It moves smoothly, silently, and unmistakably: no blinking lights, no engine sound, no navigation strobes. Just a bright white dot gliding across the stars for two to five minutes, then fading out like someone slowly turned down a dimmer.

Once you've seen a good ISS pass, you never mistake anything else for it. And with a bit of planning, they're available almost every week from almost anywhere on Earth. This guide covers exactly how.

The station is above your horizon. Its orbit is inclined 51.6° to the equator, so it passes over most inhabited parts of the world. Latitudes above about 60° N/S get fewer overhead passes and more low ones.

The station is in sunlight. Even though it's night at ground level, at 400 km up the station can still be lit by the Sun.

You are in darkness or twilight. If the sky above you is bright, you won't see even a bright satellite against it.

Together, these conditions restrict good passes to a window of roughly 1–2 hours after sunset or 1–2 hours before sunrise, when your local sky is dark but the station is still above the terminator (Earth's day/night line) at altitude. In the middle of the night, the ISS is usually eclipsed by Earth's shadow and invisible even when it's overhead.

Start time and end time — when the station rises above your horizon and when it sets or enters Earth's shadow. A typical visible pass lasts 2–6 minutes.

Maximum altitude — how high it climbs above your horizon at the pass's peak, measured in degrees. Zero is on the horizon, 90° is straight up. Passes below about 30° max altitude are dim and often blocked by trees or buildings; passes over 60° are spectacular; passes over 80° are the "wow, that's incredibly bright" ones.

Direction — described as compass points, e.g. "appears NW, disappears SE." The ISS almost always travels roughly west-to-east, but the exact track shifts north or south depending on the geometry of that particular pass.

SnapCosmos's ISS page shows the next 10 days of visible passes from your exact location, with all three numbers plus a magnitude estimate. Anything brighter than magnitude −2 is a good pass. The best passes go down to −3.9, brighter than Jupiter.

Give your eyes a couple of minutes to adjust. You don't need full dark adaptation for the ISS (it's bright), but going straight from a phone screen to a dim horizon will make it hard to catch the first appearance.

At the predicted time, look for a bright, steady white "star" that wasn't there thirty seconds ago. It won't twinkle. Aircraft have flashing anti-collision strobes and coloured navigation lights; the ISS doesn't. If you see red or green flashes, it's a plane. If the light pulses regularly, it's a plane. If it's steady and moving smoothly across the sky, you've got it.

Watch it climb toward the point of maximum altitude, then descend to the "disappears" direction. Often it doesn't set on the horizon — instead it enters Earth's shadow mid-sky, fading from brilliant white to orange to red to invisible over about 30 seconds. This shadow-fade is a beautiful thing to witness once you know what it is: you're watching the station physically enter Earth's night side while you stand in it.

If you have binoculars, hand-holding while tracking a moving object is hard, but on a high pass you can catch a hint of the ISS's shape — a bright asymmetric cross rather than a point. Photographing it requires either a telescope on a motorised mount (for detail) or a wide lens with a 2–4 minute exposure (for the streak shown in the hero image).

Iridium flares used to be famous — brief, bright flashes from the older-generation Iridium satellites — but the original constellation has been de-orbited and modern Iridium satellites don't produce them.

Starlink trains can be spectacular in the days immediately after a launch: a chain of a dozen or more evenly spaced satellites moving together across the sky. Within a few weeks they spread out and become individual, dim satellites. See our Starlink page for current spotting predictions.

The Hubble Space Telescope, the Chinese Tiangong space station, and various satellites can produce bright passes too. Tiangong is currently around magnitude −1 to −2 on the best passes, roughly a third as bright as the ISS but still very obvious. SnapCosmos flags these where relevant.

The ISS is scheduled to be de-orbited in 2030–2031 and replaced by commercial space stations already in development. That's a real deadline. If you've never watched it fly over your house, this is a good decade to start.