ISS passes tonight
The ISS is the brightest satellite in the sky: a steady, fast-moving point of light with no blinking lights, crossing the sky in about five minutes. You can only see it when the station is in sunlight while you are in darkness, so passes cluster around dusk and dawn.
We compute passes from NASA’s public ISS trajectory file, updated several times a week. Only passes higher than 10° that are actually lit by the Sun are marked visible.
Visible ISS passes
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What about Starlink “trains”?
A day or two after each SpaceX launch, a line of 20–30 Starlink satellites can cross the sky like a string of pearls. They are bright only while they sit in their low starting orbit and while sunlight catches them at dusk or dawn. Within one to two weeks they climb higher, spread out and become hard to see with the naked eye.
Look shortly after sunset or before sunrise, in the direction the ISS passes take for your place: Starlink launches use similar orbits. Seeing a train is pure luck of timing, so treat it as a bonus rather than a plan.