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Satellites

Satellites passing near you, now and in the next 24 hours

Choose a place and a distance, and this page works out which satellites have their ground point (the point straight below them) within that distance of the place right now, and every pass that comes that close in the next 24 hours, with the time, the closest distance and how sure that distance is, the satellite's height, speed and direction from you, and who owns it. The default place is Pune. It runs in your browser from the site's own orbit data, newest first.

How many satellites to expect

At any one moment, very few satellites are over any one place. A circle of 100 km around a place covers about 31,415 km² of the Earth's 510 million km², a share of 0.0062%. The data this page was built with (the live satellite feed the site had when this page was built, from 7 October 2026, 08:20 UTC) lists 16,614 active satellites. If they were spread evenly over the globe, about 1 would be inside that circle at any moment. They are not spread evenly, so a real place sees more or fewer, but it explains why the "Right now" answer is a small number, often zero: at the start of the example below, no satellite was within 100 km of Pune. Of those 16,614 active satellites, 16,547 had orbit data less than 3 days old at the data time and were worked out. Over a whole day it is different: each satellite sweeps a long track across the Earth, and in the example below 3,163 passes come within 100 km of Pune in 24 hours.

The page's script repeats this sum with the newest data when it gives its answer.

An example: Pune, from the data this page was built with

Worked out when this page was built, from the live satellite feed the site had when this page was built (from 7 October 2026, 08:20 UTC), for the 24 hours after that time, 7 October 2026, 08:20 UTC to 8 October 2026, 08:20 UTC. It shows what the tool gives; for passes from now on, use the tool above. In those 24 hours 3,163 passes came within 100 km of Pune and 71 more were borderline; at the start no satellite was within 100 km. The first 10:

How it is worked out

The distance is measured along the ground, between the place and the satellite's ground point, the point on the Earth straight below it. A straight line of 100 km from you never reaches a satellite: in the data this page was built with, the lowest active satellite is about 135 km up at its lowest point and 100% of them never come below 300 km.

• Which satellites: the active satellites in the site's data: payloads whose catalogue status is operational, partly operational, backup, spare or extended mission, the same definition as the satellite count. Rocket bodies and debris are left out.
• The orbit model: SGP4, the model made for these element sets, with the satellite.js code the 3D app uses for its pass predictions. In the data this page was built with, 162 satellites (the stations, the brightest objects and everything launched in the last 30 days) come with their full element sets. The others come from the app's compact satellite file, which has no drag terms, so their drag is taken as zero. That is why low satellites are less certain than high ones.
• The search: for each satellite, a quick test finds the times when the place can be near its orbit plane, a step search inside those times finds each closest approach, and a few fitted parabolas pin down its time. All of it runs in your browser, in a background thread, for every active satellite.
• Within, borderline, and left out: each pass carries two measured uncertainties (below): one for its closest ground distance and one for its time. A pass is "within" when the central estimate of its closest distance is inside your distance, and "borderline" when it is outside by less than the distance uncertainty. Only when that uncertainty is as large as your distance itself is a pass counted but not listed. A time uncertain by more than a few minutes is said in words. For "right now" the uncertainty is the distance uncertainty plus the ground the satellite covers in its time uncertainty, because at a fixed moment an error in time moves it along its track.
• Old data: a satellite whose element set is more than 72 hours old when you ask is left out, the rule the app uses to flag old orbit data, and the page says how many. When more than a tenth of the satellites are left out for this, the page says so at the top of its answer; when fewer than 1,000 are left, it gives no answer and says the data is too old.
• Geostationary satellites (in the geostationary belt and inclined under 2 degrees) hang over nearly the same point of the equator, so they have no passes. They are listed apart, with their offset from the place, when they are within your distance; that only happens near the equator. Inclined geosynchronous satellites, such as Japan's QZSS and some of China's BeiDou and India's NavIC satellites, swing far north and south every day and are searched for passes like the others.
• Seen from the place: the satellite's height above the horizon and its compass direction at the closest approach, and whether it is in sunlight or in the Earth's shadow. Whether you could see it also depends on a dark sky and on how bright it is, which this page does not work out. The ISS today and tonight's sky pages and the app's Tonight view cover visible passes.
• New data: the site collects CelesTrak's orbit data about every 2 hours, the rate CelesTrak's usage policy gives for its GP data. The page uses the site's live satellite data when it is newer than the copy bundled with the site, says which it used and how old it is, and while it stays open looks for newer data every few minutes and works the answer out again when some arrives.
• Your place: the place, the distance and a shareable link are kept in the address, and the last place you picked is remembered in your browser's own storage on this device. The position from "Use my location" is never stored and never sent anywhere: the whole calculation runs on your device.

How accurate is it?

We measured it. First, the model: on 16,689 real CelesTrak element sets downloaded on 7 October 2026, 04:38 UTC, the app's faster globe model put the ground point 62 km from full SGP4 at the 95% mark one day after the data time, too far for this question, so this page uses SGP4 (59.6 km at the same mark for this page's model, almost all of it along the track and caused by drag on the lowest satellites).

Then the passes themselves, which is what the "±" figures come from. An error along the track changes when a pass happens much more than how close it comes, so the two are measured apart. Passes predicted from this site's published data of 5 October 2026 (three collections, the first at 5 October 2026, 08:14 UTC) were compared with passes worked out from newer CelesTrak element sets (7 October 2026, 04:38 UTC), 12 to 72 hours after the older data, at 12 places from the poles to the equator: 1,166,209 passes of 16,689 satellites, from 3 sets of older data. Crewed stations, new launches still raising their orbits and the rest are measured apart, because they behave very differently; where a group has too few passes for an age, the figure of the age before (or of all ages together) is used, never a figure from a handful of passes. The table gives the 95% figures by height and by how long after the element set the pass comes.

A borderline row is a near miss that may have come inside: in this check about one in ten did. The "±" figures are 95% figures, so about one row in twenty can be further off than its "±" says.

The limits of this: the older data is from one day (three collections) and the newer element sets from two days later, in one week of October 2026; and the newer element sets are themselves predictions fitted to tracking, not the true positions. Satellites that fire their engines (new launches still climbing to their orbits, most of all) can be much further off; that is why satellites below 450 km and recent launches carry the widest figures. We will repeat the measurement as newer data comes in.

Questions

Why do so many satellites pass near me in a day?

Low satellites go round the Earth about 15 times a day, and the Earth turns under them, so each one draws a long track across the map. With thousands of them, hundreds or thousands of tracks cross a circle of 100 km in a day, even though only about one is inside it at any moment.

Can I see these satellites?

Not all of them, and this page does not promise it. Seeing one needs a dark sky, the satellite in sunlight and bright enough. The table says whether it is in sunlight and how high it is above your horizon; for visible passes use the ISS and tonight's sky pages or the app's Tonight view.

What does borderline mean?

The central estimate of the closest distance is a little outside your distance, by less than its measured distance uncertainty (a couple of km for most satellites, more for the lowest ones). It may have come inside, so it is shown, marked, instead of being dropped. In our check at 100 km, 10.8% of the borderline rows truly came inside the distance and 88.5% came within it plus their uncertainty.

Why is the time of some passes uncertain by minutes?

Drag slows low satellites by an amount that changes with the upper atmosphere, and the compact data most of them come from does not carry it. That shifts when a satellite arrives more than where its track lies, so the closest distance can be good to a few km while the time is uncertain by minutes. The page gives both.

Why is a satellite overhead several hundred km away?

That is its height. The page measures along the ground, from your place to the point straight below the satellite, not the straight line from you up to it.

Does my location leave my device?

No. The calculation runs in your browser with the site's own data files. A place you search for or type goes into the page's address and your browser's storage on this device; the device's position is never stored or sent.

Why is the list capped at 100 rows?

To keep the page usable. The page says how many more passes there are, and you can order the table by time or by distance to see the earliest or the nearest 100.

More about satellites on this site

• How many satellites are in orbit, counted from the same data
• Satellites by country: owners as the catalogue records them
• The ISS today: where the station is and its passes
• Tonight's sky for six cities
• The live 3D app, with the satellites above any place

Sources

• CelesTrak current GP element sets. The orbit data, collected by this site and published in its live data folder
• CelesTrak usage policy. GP data is updated every 2 hours; what it says about reuse is recorded in our source notes
• CelesTrak SATCAT. Owner, purpose, launch date and status of each satellite
• satellite.js. The SGP4 code (MIT licence) that turns element sets into positions, as in the 3D app
• Revisiting Spacetrack Report #3. The SGP4 model satellite.js follows
• GeoNames. The place search (towns of about 15,000 people and more), CC BY 4.0
• Natural Earth. The coastlines on the map; public domain

Place names and time zones in the search: GeoNames (geonames.org), CC BY 4.0. Orbits: CelesTrak. This page was built from the live satellite feed the site had when this page was built, from 7 October 2026, 08:20 UTC.