NASA Retired Spot the Station — Here's How to Track the ISS and Catch It Over Your House Tonight

Ask a room of space fans how they first saw the International Space Station and a surprising number give the same answer: a NASA tool told them when to look. Spot the Station let you pick your city and get the next sightings — time, duration, direction, how high it would climb. NASA has retired the service, and the question now living in forums is a practical one: what do we use instead?

There is no single replacement, because Spot the Station quietly did three different jobs. Split them apart, though, and each one has a good answer — two of them free on the space station tracker, and the third with one honest caveat we will get to.

Job one: it showed where the station is. Job two: it predicted sightings for your exact location — not just any pass, but the visible ones, in the dawn and dusk windows when the station is sunlit against a dark sky. Job three: it reminded you, by email or text, so the pass did not sail over while you were making dinner.

Most would-be replacements only do job one. A dot on a map is satisfying, but it does not tell you whether tonight is your night. The trick is knowing which parts you actually need: if you watch regularly, the live map plus one rule of thumb covers almost everything Spot the Station gave you.

The station circles Earth roughly every 90 minutes, and its ground track sweeps in the familiar sine wave across a world map. On WorldEye's space station tracker that track is drawn live on the globe, together with the day–night terminator — the two ingredients of a sighting. After a few orbits you can read the pattern by eye: the path shifts west each lap, and when a coming track crosses your region inside the dark band while the station's side is still sunlit, that is your pass.

The rule of thumb that replaces most predictions: look in the hour or two after sunset or before sunrise. In deep night the station flies through Earth's shadow and goes dark; in daylight it is lost in the blue. Dawn and dusk are when it blazes — brighter than any star, steady, and fast, crossing the sky in about five minutes. Our longer guide to how to watch the ISS live walks through the geometry, the station's own live cameras, and what you can and cannot make out from the ground.

And because the station is one object among thousands, the same map carries the rest of the sky through the satellite tracker — Starlink trains included, which are the other bright procession people most often mistake for something stranger.

Spot the Station's emails were its stickiest feature, and no map — ours included — replaces a reminder that arrives before the pass. WorldEye does not send per-location ISS pass alerts, and any site that implies a live map alone does that job is overselling.

What regulars actually do now: check the tracker in the late afternoon, read the evening's tracks against the terminator, and set a phone alarm for the promising one. It takes a minute, it works for any spot on Earth rather than a preset city list, and it has a side benefit no email ever gave — you learn to read the orbit, and after a few weeks you are predicting passes for your neighbours.

Open the [live globe](/) in the late afternoon and find the station's track. If a pass crosses your part of the world in the two hours after your sunset, be outside ten minutes early with a clear view of the sky — no telescope, no binoculars needed; the station is unmissable when it comes, a bright white point moving like a silent airliner with no blinking lights. Face the direction the track approaches from, and give your eyes a few minutes to adjust.

Miss it, and the rhythm forgives you: the pattern of tracks repeats on a cycle of days, and another visible pass over your house is never more than a few evenings away. That was always the real gift of Spot the Station — not the alert, but the discovery that the largest machine humanity has built flies over your street, on schedule, waiting to be noticed.