The ISS (Zarya)

The International Space Station

The International Space Station is a large space station that was assembled and is maintained in low Earth orbit by a collaboration of five space agencies and their contractors: NASA, Roscosmos, ESA, JAXA, and CSA. The ISS is the largest space station ever built.

🛰️ Next ISS Pass

📍 Location: Finding location...
Using IP-based location (city-level accuracy) Using GPS location (precise accuracy) Using fallback location

The ISS will be observable from your location in:

Calculating...

🎯 Max altitude: °
🧭 Direction: to
Frequently Freaked-out-ly asked questions

"Leonard, from where are you getting this data?"

From NASA.

"How are you doing this?"

So, I get TLE (two-line element) data from NASA, which is an encoded data in plain-text. It's in plain-text and not in a modern format like JSON or XML because, they weren't available at the time. TLEs were born in the 1960s when NORAD (US Military) began tracking satellites during the early space race. So, long story short. If you know the NORAD ID of an Earth Orbiting object, you can get it's TLE data, and then use that to see where exactly it is.

"why are you doing this?"

One line answer: Because I can? and it's kinda cool.
Detailed answer: When I was young, one night, on a clear sky, I spotted an unidentified flying object. I thought I spotted actual aliens flying over the earth and got excited, and then as I googled about it, I discovered that it's the ISS, and there are humans living inside of it. The excitement grew.

"How are you getting my location?"

I'm not. It's based off your IP address. So if you're using a VPN, then the IP of your VPN is shown.