How accurate is the ISS position?

Positions come from wheretheiss.at, which computes the station's orbit from published two-line elements. Accuracy is within a few kilometers — more than good enough to know which continent or ocean the ISS is passing over right now.

Why does the position update every 5 seconds?

The station orbits Earth at about 7.66 km/s, so it moves roughly 38 km between refreshes. Five seconds keeps the trail smooth while staying well inside the free API's limits thanks to our edge cache.

What does daylight vs eclipsed mean?

The ISS is in daylight when the Sun is above its horizon, and eclipsed when Earth blocks the Sun. Astronauts see 16 sunrises and sunsets every day because the orbit takes only about 92 minutes.

Who is shown in the crew manifest?

Every human currently in space, from all agencies and vehicles, courtesy of the open-notify.org people-in-space feed. If that feed is briefly offline, the panel says so instead of guessing.

ISS Tracker

Latitude—

Longitude—

Altitude—

Velocity—

—

Acquiring signal…

Crew manifest · humans in space

Contacting crew roster…

Simplified decorative world outline · position from the wheretheiss.at public API, crew from open-notify.org.

Why the ISS moves the way it does

Live every 5 seconds

A dedicated edge-cached feed refreshes the station's position five times a minute — smooth enough to watch it cross an ocean during a coffee break.

Fading ground track

The last two minutes of flight are drawn as a glowing trail on the world map, so the orbit direction and ground speed are obvious at a glance.

Humans in space, listed

The crew manifest names every astronaut and cosmonaut currently off Earth, refreshed hourly from the open-notify people-in-space feed.

Living at 28,000 km/h, 400 km Up

The International Space Station circles Earth every 92 minutes at an altitude of roughly 400 kilometers, traveling 7.66 kilometers per second — ten times faster than a rifle bullet. At that pace the crew sees sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets every single day, and the station's ground track shifts westward about 22 degrees each orbit, which is why this tracker shows it over a different part of the planet every time you look.

What the HUD shows

🛰️ Real-time latitude and longitude projected onto a simplified world map
📈 A fading ground-track trail of the last two minutes of flight
📏 Live altitude (~400 km) and orbital velocity (~27,600 km/h)
☀️ Daylight or eclipsed status, plus the full human-in-space crew manifest

Altitude matters: the thermosphere still drags on the station, stealing about two kilometers of height per month, so visiting cargo vehicles periodically re-boost it. Watching the numbers here tick upward and downward is watching a real spacecraft constantly falling around Earth — and missing.