Jim Rossman: Space station is easy to spot if you know when to look up

There was a lot of NASA and moon talk surrounding the recent Artemis II launch, and while that mission makes for great TV, there's not much to see if you're just looking up from your backyard.

Did you know that you can see the International Space Station with your naked eye as it orbits overhead?

My wife and I take great joy in running out to the driveway and trying to be the first to spot the space station. Frequently, as we are out watching it fly over, neighbors will see us looking up and ask what we're doing.

When we tell them we are watching the space station and point it out to them, they'll inevitably ask, "How do you know when it'll be flying over?"

Easy. There's an app for that from NASA called "Spot The Station."

Download the free app from the iOS App Store or Google Play store and start it up and set your home location.

You'll then see a page that centers your location on the globe and you'll see the current orbit of the space station. And you'll see a breakdown of the next few opportunities for seeing the ISS from your location.

You'll quickly learn the only time you can actually see the space station is around sunrise or sunset. This is because it needs to be reasonably dark.

The space station itself doesn't emit any light that's visible from the ground. When you spot it, you're seeing the sun's light reflecting, so the sighting opportunities are an hour or two before sunrise or an hour or two after sunset.

Also note, the orbit is a big zigzag, it's not just a perfect circle. Depending on the orbit path, the sightings may be early (think 6 a.m.) for a few days in a row, or it may not be visible at all for a week or more because the ISS is flying over your location when it's too light or too dark to see it.

The listings for the viewing opportunities will tell you how long the flyover will last (anywhere from one minute to five minutes), how high up it will be in the sky, expressed in degrees. Zero degrees is the horizon line. 90 degrees is straight overhead. You'll also get compass coordinates for the flight path.

When it's time to see the station, just look up in the direction indicated and watch for a bright object that's moving at a medium fast pace. You might think its an airplane, but the space station light will not blink and it'll look more like a bright star that's moving in an arc.

Sometimes it'll be just over the horizon and other times, straight overhead. You can filter the app to just show you the better viewing opportunities, filtering out lower or shorter or dimmer viewings. It will also take cloud cover into account when recommending viewings for you.

Finally, you can set up notifications, so you can get an alert on your phone when the station is approaching. We set our notification to 10 minutes before flyover to give us enough time to put on our shoes and get outside.

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This story was originally published April 22, 2026 at 4:19 AM.