Is the ISS Visible Tonight?
The International Space Station is the third-brightest object in the night sky, but it is only visible for a few minutes at a time, around dawn and dusk, and only if it happens to pass near your part of the sky. This page computes tonight’s pass schedule for your exact location with the same SGP4 orbital engine used by the live tracker — showing when to go outside, which direction to look, how high it will climb, and how long the sighting will last. Prefer a fixed place? See when the ISS will pass over any of 33 major cities.
VISIBLE pass
Upcoming passes in the next 48 hours
Searching by your exact location gives the most precise answer, because nearby towns share a sky. If you want a fixed place instead — for planning a trip, or a ready-made local-time schedule — each city page below shows the next visible pass and a two-day table with start time, duration, maximum elevation, and direction in that city’s own clock:
- ISS pass times for New York
- ISS pass times for London
- ISS pass times for Delhi
- ISS pass times for Tokyo
- ISS pass times for Sydney
- ISS pass times for Toronto
See all 33 city pass-time pages.
What a visible pass looks like
A visible pass never happens in the middle of the night. It occurs right after sunset or just before sunrise, when the station is still high enough to be lit by the sun while your patch of ground is dark. The station looks like a bright, steady, non-blinking star moving in a straight line across the sky — not a plane (no lights or blinking), not a satellite flare (no twinkle).
The maximum elevation tells you how high above the horizon it will climb: below about 15° it can easily disappear behind trees or buildings, while a pass near overhead can last as long as six minutes. The direction is where to look at the start of the pass — the station begins low in one part of the sky and rises across it before fading near the opposite horizon.
No visible pass tonight?
Some nights simply have no usable pass. The ISS does not cross near every location on every orbit, and the pattern shifts a little with every lap around the planet. If tonight has nothing, the finder above automatically shows the next available visible pass instead — usually within a day or two — with its exact date and time. Passes cluster in short seasons: you may get several on consecutive nights and then a gap.
Cloud cover and ground light also matter. Even a perfect prediction will fail behind a thick deck of cloud, and bright city glow makes low passes much harder to spot. On the tracker page, the listed passes also show an estimated cloud-cover note for each pass when a forecast is available.
For a full view of upcoming passes — every one for the next two days, not just tonight — open the pass list. And to see where the station is right now while you wait to go outside, check the live position map.
View all pass times Where is the ISS right now?