When can you see the space station?

You can see it when the sky is dark where you are and the station, high above you, is still in sunlight. This happens in the first hours after sunset or before sunrise. Visible passes often come several days in a row, then stop for a while. ISS Tracker shows you each one.

The station has no bright lights of its own. You see sunlight reflected from its large solar panels. When it moves into Earth’s shadow, it turns orange, fades and disappears within a few seconds, even in the middle of the sky.

A bright, steady white dot that moves smoothly across the sky, faster than most planes, with no blinking lights. It’s often brighter than any star. A pass lasts a few minutes, up to about six.

Yes. You don’t need an account. It works on iPhone and iPad with iOS 26 or later.

The app needs your location to calculate when the station passes over you. The calculation runs on your iPhone or iPad, and we never receive your location.

Pass times are predictions from the station’s latest orbit data, which the app downloads when you open it. The station changes its orbit a few times a year, so a difference of a minute or two from other apps is normal.

No. When you turn alerts on, you get one alert about 3 hours before the first good pass of a night (for a morning pass, at 8 PM the evening before), and one 5 minutes before each good pass. A good pass climbs at least 30° above the horizon, or is bright and long. If there’s no good pass for two weeks, you hear about the best one instead.

Each pass shows the cloud forecast from Apple Weather when one is available, and the alert a few hours before says if clouds are expected.

It does the same job on your phone: a note a few hours before a good pass, and another 5 minutes before it appears. ISS Tracker isn’t made by NASA.