ISS live: watch Earth from the space station.
Right now, about 400 km over your head, the International Space Station is moving at 28,000 km/h with people aboard. Lumara carries its live HD Earth camera, so you can pull up the actual view of the planet sliding past underneath, coastlines and storm systems and city lights, in real time and for free. It is the closest thing to looking out the cupola window without a rocket.
What you are looking at.
The feed on the Lumara dashboard is NASA's high definition camera mounted on the outside of the station, pointed down at Earth. When the station is on the daylight side you get the full view: ocean, cloud, and land rolling by at five miles a second. About every 45 minutes the station crosses into Earth's shadow and the screen goes dark, because it is night down there too. That is not a glitch. Give it a few minutes and the sunrise comes back, one of sixteen the crew sees every day.
Where is the ISS right now?
The station never sits still. It completes one orbit roughly every 93 minutes, tilted 51.6 degrees to the equator, which carries it over almost everywhere people live between northern Canada and the southern tip of South America. Lumara shows you the live view from the station rather than a dot on a map, so if you want its exact ground position and, more useful, the next time it passes over your own town, NASA runs a free service called Spot the Station that lists the visible passes for your location.
How to see it with your own eyes.
You do not need a telescope. The ISS is one of the brightest objects in the night sky, brighter than any star, and it moves: a steady point of light gliding across the sky in two or three minutes with no blinking. The trick is timing. You can only catch it in the hour or so after sunset or before sunrise, when your sky is dark but the station, high up, is still catching sunlight. Spot the Station tells you exactly when to look and which direction. Then come back to the feed to see the same view the crew had as they crossed over you.
The numbers, quickly.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Altitude | About 400 km (250 miles) |
| Speed | About 28,000 km/h (7.66 km/s) |
| Time for one orbit | About 93 minutes |
| Orbits per day | About 16 |
| Orbit tilt | 51.6 degrees to the equator |
While you are watching the planet from orbit, the rest of Lumara points the other way: the live Sun in twelve NASA wavelengths, the current moon phase for your city, and real time space weather. It is one quiet window on everything happening just past the atmosphere.