Right now, about 420 kilometres above your head, the International Space Station is crossing the sky at 27,600 kilometres per hour — fast enough to circle the entire planet every 93 minutes and give its crew 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every single day. This free ISS tracker shows you exactly where it is at this moment: live latitude and longitude, altitude, and speed, refreshed every five seconds from the station’s real tracking data. Watch the longitude numbers spin and you are watching orbital mechanics in real time: in the time it takes to read this page, the station has travelled roughly the width of a continent.
How to read this ISS tracker
The big numbers are the station’s current latitude and longitude — the point on Earth’s surface directly beneath it. Below them sit its altitude (which breathes between roughly 413 and 422 km as the orbit decays and is boosted back up), its speed of about 7.66 km every second, whether it is currently in daylight or in Earth’s shadow (shown as “eclipsed”), and the diameter of the patch of Earth from which it can be seen above the horizon. The display refreshes itself every five seconds; the pause button freezes it if you want to note a position down.
When can you actually see it?
The station is the third-brightest object in the sky, but only visible when three things line up: it is dark where you stand, the ISS passes overhead, and the station itself is still lit by the Sun — which is why sightings cluster around dawn and dusk. The footprint figure tells you how wide the viewing zone is: if the station’s ground point passes within a few hundred kilometres of you during twilight, look up for a bright, steady light moving smoothly across the sky, crossing in about six minutes. It does not blink — blinking lights are aircraft; the ISS shines with reflected sunlight, steady as a planet.
Why the position changes so fast
At 27,600 km/h the station covers one degree of latitude roughly every 11 seconds, and its ground track shifts westward with every orbit because the Earth rotates beneath it — which is why it does not pass over the same places at the same times each day, and why its path draws that famous wave pattern on flat maps. Its orbit is tilted 51.6 degrees to the equator, so it never flies over the poles and regularly crosses everything between about 51.6° north and south — home to more than 90% of humanity.
About the data
Positions come from the WhereTheISS.at service, which computes them continuously from the station’s published orbital elements — the same data space agencies use. The figures are the station’s real calculated position at the second shown, accurate to within a few kilometres, which is more precision than any naked-eye observer can use. The station has been continuously crewed since November 2000, so every coordinate on this page marks a place that seven or so people are, at this moment, flying over at eight times the speed of a rifle bullet.
The station in numbers
The ISS is the largest object humans have ever put in orbit: about 109 metres end to end — a football pitch, give or take — with a mass of roughly 420 tonnes and solar arrays that cover more area than the wing of a Boeing 747. It has been assembled piece by piece since 1998 by five space agencies, and it shows in the coordinate feed: the position you are watching is calculated for the whole structure’s centre of mass. Its orbit loses roughly two kilometres of altitude a month to the whisper-thin drag of the upper atmosphere, which is why visiting cargo craft periodically fire their engines to push it back up — watch the altitude long enough across a reboost and you can see the station climb.
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