How to Spot the International Space Station in the Sky
If you’ve ever looked up at the lights in the night sky and wondered if there’s life out there, rest assured there is. The third brightest object in the sky is the International Space Station, which is currently home to seven people: three NASA astronauts, one person from the European Space Agency and three Russian cosmonauts. Finding the ISS in its orbit is also easy – if you know where (and when) to look. The ISS is not the only spacecraft orbiting the Earth. There are thousands of them, and many of them are large enough and low enough to be seen with the naked eye.
How to find the International Space Station
The ISS is the simplest man-made object that can be seen in the night sky. This thing is huge – the size of a football field – and reflects enough sunlight to appear 16 times brighter than the North Star if the conditions are right. It also orbits the Earth every 90 minutes, so you should probably be able to see it in the next few days.
Due to the station’s orbit, you can only see it shortly after or before sunset in the continental United States. It appears low in the sky, close to the horizon, and looks like a fast-moving plane, only without flashing lights. It also doesn’t “twinkle” like a star, it’s just relatively fast moving light.
To make it easier for you to view the satellite, NASA maintainsSpot the Station , a location-based site that will tell you exactly when to look up to see the space station. Go to the site, enter your hometown and mark the next appearance of the ISS on the calendar.
As with any stargazing, for the best experience, find a place as dark as possible, turn off all lights for about half an hour to allow your eyes to adjust, and look at the part of the sky that NASA recommends. You don’t need a telescope or binoculars to see the ISS, but I highly recommend using either: it’s great to see the real shape of the satellite.
How to discover StarLink satellites
No matter how you feel about Elon Musk, his armada of thousands of satellites looks pretty cool in the night sky. SpaceX’s Starlink satellites that provide internet look like a string of lights that many mistake for UFOs .
They are in very low orbit, but they are small so they can be a bit harder to spot than the ISS. When you can see them depends on where you are and the cloud cover obviously, but this site uses your exact location to tell you when the next (hopefully visible) Starlink network passes and uses Google Street View to show you exactly where to look at the sky. You can even schedule a reminder so you don’t miss it.