How to Track Starlink Satellites in Real Time

Every satellite in orbit follows a path that can be predicted days in advance from a small block of numbers. Those numbers are published openly, updated several times a day, and are the same data professional tracking systems use. Everything below is built on them.

Start with the live globe

The home page renders the whole active constellation on a 3D globe. Each dot is a real satellite, placed using its most recent published orbital elements and advanced with the SGP4 propagation model — the standard algorithm for this class of orbit, and the one used across the satellite-tracking world.

The important detail is that this runs in your browser, continuously. You are not looking at a snapshot rendered on a server an hour ago; the positions are being recomputed as you watch, which is why the constellation visibly drifts if you leave the page open.

Click any dot to open that satellite's own page, with its live altitude, velocity, inclination and current ground position.

Then ask what is above you specifically

The globe answers 'where is everything'. The coverage view answers the more useful question: what is above my horizon right now.

Search a city or share your location and you get a live count of satellites currently in line of sight, plus a table of where each one is in your sky. This is the same geometric calculation a Starlink dish performs to decide which satellite to point at — you are seeing the raw version of it.

Learn the three numbers

Almost all satellite tracking reduces to three values describing where an object is relative to you. Once these are familiar, every tracking tool becomes readable.

• Elevation — how high above the horizon, in degrees. 0° is the horizon, 90° is directly overhead. Below about 10° the satellite is usually behind terrain or haze
• Azimuth — the compass direction to look, in degrees clockwise from north. 0° is north, 90° east, 180° south, 270° west
• Range — the straight-line distance from you to the satellite in kilometres. Directly overhead this is roughly the orbital altitude; near the horizon it can be three times that

Elevation and azimuth together pin a point in your sky. Range tells you how far away it is, which is why a pass low on the horizon is both dimmer and higher-latency than one overhead.

Use pass predictions to plan a viewing

Real-time position tells you where a satellite is. A pass prediction tells you where one will be, which is what you need if you intend to stand outside and look at it.

The pass pages on this site compute, for a specific location, every Starlink pass over the next 24 hours that is actually visible — meaning the satellite is lit by the Sun while your own sky is dark enough to see it. That filter matters enormously. Hundreds of satellites cross overhead every night; only a fraction are illuminated at a moment when you can see them.

Each prediction gives you a start time, the compass direction the satellite rises in, the maximum elevation it reaches, where it sets, and how long the whole pass lasts. That is everything required to point a person at a specific piece of sky at a specific minute.

Reading a pass prediction in practice

Say a pass reads: 21:14, rises W, peak 78° toward S, sets E, duration 6m. Here is how to use it.

Be outside by 21:10 and face west. Let your eyes adapt — this is the step people skip, and it costs them the fainter passes. At 21:14 a steady point of light will appear low in the west. It will not blink; aircraft blink, satellites do not. Follow it as it climbs. At its peak it will be 78° up, almost directly overhead but tilted south. It will then descend toward the east and either set below the horizon or fade out abruptly partway down.

The abrupt fade is normal and worth expecting. It means the satellite has flown into Earth's shadow — it is still there, just no longer catching sunlight.

Why predictions are not perfect

Orbital elements describe an orbit at a specific instant, called the epoch. Propagating forward from that instant accumulates error, because the real satellite is subject to atmospheric drag, solar radiation pressure, and its own thruster firings — none of which the model knows about in advance.

For Starlink at 550 km, elements a few hours old give predictions accurate to well within the precision a naked-eye observer needs. Elements several days old start to drift noticeably, and elements from a satellite that has just performed an orbit-raising manoeuvre can be wrong immediately.

This is why fresh data matters, and why this site refreshes its orbital elements from the public feed several times a day rather than caching them indefinitely.

Identifying what you have already seen

The reverse problem — you saw something and want to know what it was — is solvable if you noted the time and roughly where it was in the sky.

Open the pass predictions for your location and the relevant date, and look for a pass whose start time, direction and peak elevation match what you remember. Steady brightness, a horizon-to-horizon crossing in three to six minutes, and no flashing points to a satellite. Several moving in a line, closely spaced, is almost certainly a recently launched Starlink batch.

What the tracking data cannot tell you

Orbital mechanics predicts position with high confidence. It says nothing about whether the sky is clear, how bright the satellite will actually appear, or whether the streetlight two doors down will wash it out.

Brightness in particular is hard to predict well. It depends on the satellite's orientation, which surfaces are catching sunlight, the angle between the Sun, satellite and observer, and — for Starlink specifically — which generation of anti-reflective treatment that particular satellite carries. Peak elevation is a decent proxy: higher passes are closer, and closer is brighter. It is a proxy, not a guarantee.