ISS View: a simulated view from the International Space Station's current position

How this view is made

The station's position is calculated in your browser every frame from its latest published orbit (TLE) with the SGP4 model. The camera is placed at that position, and Earth is drawn with NASA satellite imagery, sunlight for the current time, and a modeled atmosphere.

What is real and what is not

• Not live video. No camera on the station is used.
• Clouds and the day side come from NASA VIIRS daily composites, not the current moment.
• Stars are hidden while sunlit Earth is directly below, as in most photos from orbit: bright Earth overwhelms them. They appear once the ground below is past sunset, even while the station itself is still in sunlight. Their positions come from the Tycho-2 catalog sky map built into CesiumJS.
• Around orbital sunset and sunrise, a faint orange band is drawn on the horizon on the Sun's side as an illustration: the sky model itself has no sunset colors.
• City lights on the night side are NASA Black Marble 2016, an annual composite.
• Position accuracy depends on the age of the orbit data; it is usually within a few kilometers, but can drift by tens of kilometers when the data is several days old.
• CUSTOM ORBIT shows a hypothetical orbit computed with SGP4 from the perigee, apogee and inclination you set, without drag or maneuvers. It is not a real spacecraft.
• Circular orbits start over your country (or the nearest latitude the orbit reaches); elliptical orbits start at perigee on your country's longitude.
• The perigee and apogee you enter are approximate: SGP4 treats them as mean values, and Earth's shape makes the computed altitude vary around them by up to a few tens of kilometers.
• Country labels use simplified boundaries and are approximate. They are not a political statement.
• Passes over a country are found from simplified outlines (about 5 km), so a pass of a few seconds near a border can be missed or appear slightly early or late.

Orbit at a glance

The station circles Earth about every 92 minutes, so it sees about 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets a day.

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Want to see the ISS from the ground? Find visible passes →

Data sources

• Orbit: OrbitSmith fused GP catalog (Space-Track.org / CelesTrak)
• Day-side imagery: NASA GIBS · VIIRS NOAA-20 / NOAA-21 Corrected Reflectance · Blue Marble Next Generation
• Night lights: NASA GIBS · VIIRS Black Marble 2016
• 3D engine: CesiumJS 1.123 (Apache-2.0) · SGP4: satellite.js 6.0.2
• Boundaries: Natural Earth 1:50m (public domain)

Educational use only. Not affiliated with or endorsed by NASA or any space agency.