The live sky · drawn
Ten thousand satellites,
computed over your head.
The space station, the hundred brightest objects and the whole Starlink shell, moving live across a hand-drawn globe with the night side inked in. Nothing here is a picture of the sky — every position is computed in your browser, this second, from the published orbital elements the world's trackers share.
Tell it where you stand and it turns into tonight's viewing guide: what is over your head right now, and when the station next rises in your sky — which direction, how high, for how long, and whether you will actually see it.
The sky
The fleet, live on the globe.
Dots are satellites at their computed positions; the shaded half is night; the marked dot is your pick, with its ground track drawn one whole orbit around. Click any dot to read it. Time can run faster than life — the clock says so whenever it does.
The globe
Loading the fleet…
Overhead
Your sky, tonight.
Set where you stand — typed, or from the browser's own location button — and everything below is computed for that spot: the objects above your horizon this second, and the station's next passes with direction, height and honest visibility.
Above you now
ISS passes — next 48 hours
Visible means your sky is dark while the satellite is still in sunlight — the only way a pass is seen by eye.
The ledger
The fleet as a table.
Every object in the loaded element sets, with its computed state as the table was drawn — it is not on the live beat the globe and the readout are, because redrawing ten thousand rows every second would cost more than it tells you. Search by name or NORAD number; pick a row to put it on the globe, where it does move live.
Method
Computed, not fetched.
The elements are the input
Satellites are tracked publicly, and their orbits are published as two-line element sets (TLEs, via CelesTrak). ORBIT ships a dated snapshot of three sets — the stations, the hundred-odd brightest objects, and the Starlink constellation — and tells you exactly how old it is. Elements drift slowly; a days-old set still places a satellite within sight of the truth.
The mathematics is the property
Positions are never downloaded. An SGP4 propagator — the standard model the element sets are fitted against, implemented from scratch in plain JavaScript on WGS-72 — turns elements into where each object is this second, in your browser, offline once the page is loaded. The engine ships with a built-in self-test against the reference implementation, agreeing to fractions of a millimetre.
What is honestly excluded
This engine implements the near-earth model only. Objects with periods of 225 minutes or more (deep-space, e.g. geostationary) need the deep-space extension, so they are counted, labelled and excluded — never approximated. The passes table calls a pass visible only when your sky is dark and the satellite is sunlit; everything else is just a radio pass, and it says so.
Nothing about you leaves
Your location is used in the mathematics and kept in your browser; no request carries it anywhere. The globe is drawn from embedded coastline data — no map tiles, no third-party requests of any kind. The whole property works with the network unplugged.
Element sets © their public sources; accuracy is that of SGP4 on the snapshot's epoch — plenty to point a finger at the sky, not to fly anything.