Skip to main content

Spot the International Space Station passing overhead on Tuesday night

If you live on the East Coast or in the southeast of the United States and the skies are clear tonight, stick your head out the window and there’s a good chance you’ll see the International Space Station passing overhead.

The unique spectacle will last a whole six minutes, and thanks to the bright reflection of the sun on the exterior of the station, you don’t need any special kit to see it. NASA says it’s easy to spot, describing it as looking like “a very bright star moving across the sky.”

Check out the graphic in the tweet below for precise information on when it’ll be passing over your neighborhood.

Orbiting Earth at an altitude of around 250 miles, the space station is currently home to five astronauts, including NASA’s Chris Cassidy, Doug Hurley, and Bob Behnken. Hurley and Behnken arrived at the end of May aboard the Crew Dragon in what was SpaceX’s first ever astronaut launch, as well as the first crewed launch from U.S. soil since the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. Behnken and Cassidy have been busy performing several spacewalks in recent weeks, with another one planned for Thursday, July 16.

If you miss the space station passing overhead tonight, or you live in another part of the U.S. — or indeed elsewhere in the world — there’s a good chance the orbiting outpost will be passing overhead in the near future as it continues to orbit Earth. This Digital Trends article tells you all you need to know to get a glimpse.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
Four space station astronauts just took Crew Dragon ‘for a spin’
SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft.

Four crewmembers at the International Space Station (ISS) enjoyed a short ride aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Endeavour on Saturday, moving the spacecraft to a different port to make way for a cargo ship arriving in June.

SpaceX Crew-6 members Stephen Bowen and Woody Hoburg of NASA, along with Sultan Alneyadi of the United Arab Emirates and Andrey Fedyaev of Russia, undocked from the Harmony module’s space-facing port at 7:23 a.m. before flying the short distance to the same module’s forward port.

Read more
Watch a cosmonaut hurl a piece of ISS garbage into the abyss
nasa announces breakthrough in search for iss air leak space station

Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin embarked on a spacewalk at the International Space Station (ISS) at 4 p.m. ET on Wednesday to relocate an experiment airlock from the Rassvet module to the Nauka science module.

NASA live-streamed the spacewalk and also posted footage on the ISS Twitter account.

Read more
How to watch SpaceX’s spacecraft take a very short trip on Saturday
A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft docked at the ISS.

NASA is making final preparations to move the SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft to a different port at the International Space Station (ISS).

NASA Live: Official Stream of NASA TV

Read more