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Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites
- mrspacejam 2mo agocool site! i appreciate satellite trackers and sometimes leave satellite.love up in the background in orbit mode with the music on at home.
- Eduard 2mo agothe geosynchronous satellites fall on and bounce off earth
- delichon 2mo agoIf you zoom in you can see them moving. Click on them to see their tracks. I'm surprised how random the orbits seem. It's too cloudy at the moment but maybe on a clear night I can check the accuracy by looking up.
- killjoywashere 2mo agoWith clear, dark skies, you definitely can.
- Quiza12 2mo agoSeeing them "slowly" move (but in reality incredibly quickly) reminds me of reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(novel)
- ultimoo 2mo agoare their orbits and trajectories computed ahead of time to avoid collisions?
- bagels 2mo agoYes.
- rolph 2mo agoits not the most intuitive setup but theres a lot of info available. click on a dot and it will show up on a list to top left, click on an item in that list and you get a flyout menu to the top left with a bunch of data regarding the satellite.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- philipwhiuk 2mo agoGenerally orbits are predicted many circumnavigations out, with manoeuvres being necessary to handle crossing paths and orbital decay from atmospheric drag.
- ikari_pl 2mo agoI'm surprised that getting our low space to this state was even legal
- vachina 2mo agoUS runs the show. Anything is possible.
- signatoremo 2mo agoIf that was true China wouldn’t be able to launch as much as they have done
- vachina 2mo agoUS will allow you to play in their playground up to a certain point. China’s experiments wont result in a threat.
- vixen99 2mo agoMeanwhile: Is this true? 'Secret military documents from clandestine forums between Russia and China have revealed a possible joint strategic plan to disable Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network alongside a deep weapons development partnership spanning hypersonic missile defense and autonomous drones, The Insider reported on July 9.' https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/07/09/russia-and-china-discussed-plans-to-destroy-starlink-satellites-and-develop-a-joint-air-defense-system-the-insider-reports https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/07/09/russia-and-china-discus...
- iknowstuff 2mo agoThere’s a lot of space in space. This is not to scale.
- krige 2mo agoThere's a lot of space in air, and yet we have multiple midair collisions every year.
- hn111 2mo agoHalf a year ago, I captured a photograph of a long train of satellites. However, when I navigate to that location using this tool, I don’t see any satellite train present at that specific timestamp. I wonder if there are other satellites not included in this dataset, or if I should search way further from the location on the map
- kortilla 2mo agoA lot of the trackers miss the trains because trains occur within the first few orbits after a launch. So if they don’t start recording data until some delayed event, they miss it. I had this problem a lot with live night sky trackers not showing the trains despite me seeing them quite clearly.
- voidUpdate 2mo agoIt might also be taking the latest TLEs for satellites, I don't know if there's a database of historical TLEs, so it would only show the current orbit
- scrollop 2mo agoWhy are there demarcations towards the poles where the satellite density drops off? Seems Norway, Sweden and Finland have a much lower density of satellites .
- gbalduzzi 2mo agoI wanted to ask the same thing. There are two clearly demarcations both north and south
- rolph 2mo agopolar orbits are hard, you have to take a big oblique track dipping into the lower lattitudes to run a trajectory that allows you to counter gravity. the anti collision manuevers are hard as well. orbits are simpler at lower lattitudes where you run a trajectory, close to parallel to the equator.
- dredmorbius 2mo agoPopulations are also far lower than at lower latitudes. This affects both commercial potential (fewer possible subscribers) and bandwidth congestion (dittos). For both you'd want fewer birds in those orbits, and orbital dynamics only strengthen the argument.
- peddling-brink 2mo agoMy understanding, and I’m not a rocket scientist, is that it’s easier to launch east/west and it costs a lot of delta v to move into a polar orbit.
- kortilla 2mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination In order to cover those northern/southern extremes, more expensive high inclination orbits are required (in the US these are launched from California). They are more expensive because you’re no longer getting the rotational velocity of the earth for free in your orbital velocity. So for a LEO constellation you want to minimize the launches to high inclinations and keep the bulk in those juicy easterly ones.
- namuol 2mo agoThat big zoom-out of Earth in the opening sequence of WALL•E comes to mind.
- figgy99 2mo agoNice site but personally I like satellite.love more and satellitetracker3d.com is cool too, there's about 500 of these all with varying features.
- Cider9986 2mo ago[flagged]
- saastester 2mo agoThat’s a good point. I understand why satellite.love stands out in terms of atmosphere—it’s the app I’d leave running in the background. Satellite Tracker 3D seems more straightforward when I want to take a closer look at a specific object, while satellitemap.space offers the most comprehensive features once you get used to its somewhat cluttered user interface. So I don’t think there’s a clear winner; each of these apps is optimized for atmosphere, user-friendliness, and data depth, respectively.
- kklisura 2mo agoJust thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...
- gspr 2mo agoSure, if you're able to accurately determine angles between the Earth's tangent at your location and the satellites. That's how you'd navigate using the sun, moon and stars. I suspect those natural celestial bodies are much less of a hassle than man-made satellites. This contrasts greatly with actual GNSS – the whole point of GPS and the others is that you don't need to determine those angles. The only thing you need to determine is the signal delay (i.e. distance) from a few satellites. That's a lot more convenient.
- zipy124 2mo agoNot an expert but I imagine the problem with using vision is the problem of angular error propagation. That is the angle-> distance error problem: linear error≈Rtan(Δθ)≈RΔθ Here linear error is the error in position, R is the distance from the observer to the target and θ is the angle error. You would need incredibly good optics and resolution to minimise angular error and thus linear error.
- _diyar 2mo agoYes but the errors would be uncorrelated and if you could use many different measurements you should be able to estimate with reasonable certainty.
- zipy124 2mo agoGiven the large R (Even starlink satellites are far away compared to positional accuracy needed) and probably pretty large angular error, your still talking error of kilometres, though with good optics you may be able to get this down to hundreds of meters. The other problem is knowing the position isn't trivial, since their position drifts relative to predicted and isn't known very precisely. There is also the problem that as R shrinks, speed increases relative to you.
- petarb 2mo agoJust wow, I didn’t realize there’s that many star link satellites in orbit.
- philipwhiuk 2mo agoIt's deeply misleading to mis-represent the size of satellites at this point.
- jcims 2mo agoYeah if the lower 48 states (~2800 miles) span the width of my entire screen (2560px), each pixel represents just over a mile. The satellites at that level were rendered with dots that are ~3px or just over 3 miles/.1% of that width. The Starlink v2 is 100ft on it's longest dimension. This means that the actual size of the satellite relative to the dot is on the same order of magnitude (.6%) as the dot is to the size of the US when it takes up my entire screen.
- greengreengrass 2mo agoNice site, but I'm really missing any altitude reference for the satellites. It's hard to use any satellite tracker with any degree of utility other than as a toy website when it's exceedingly difficult to determine and compare basic altitude information across different satellites.
- beklein 2mo agoTo get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles). A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.
- webdoodle 2mo agoWhether the pixels are not representative of actual size, seems like putting lipstick on a pig. When I look up at night, I can't see the night sky without several satellites interrupting my view. Even a brief 10 second glance, will produce at least 1. Their is no communication need that is greater than our need to understand space and space weather. If the satellite operators can't stop destroying the night sky, their launch permission should be removed, so as their old satellites fall, new ones won't be allowed to launch. Further, if the federal government won't intervene (looking at the U.S. because Starlink). Then states should make those satellite receivers illegal.
- SiempreViernes 2mo agoThere's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it: > The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km. https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/305/SDC9-paper305.pdf https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...
- beklein 2mo agoThanks for sharing the paper, it seems my intuition on size was bad but also my intuition on max satellite density for LEO was wrong.
- bdavbdav 2mo agoFunny the location of the ground stations. Very odd clustering.
- inemesitaffia 2mo agoUse starlink.sx instead
- iamacyborg 2mo agoI always like looking at this one https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization
- nchmy 2mo agoi just clicked on one satellite and followed it as it moved. it crossed a continent in like a minute. Is that accurate? Seems too fast. Moreover, are the satellites all moving around like that, haphazardly?
- Svoka 2mo agothere is a default three.js control panel. By default it has speed at 25x and 'Follow Earth' checkmark, which makes camera do weird things.
- connicpu 2mo agoIt's not haphazard, it's a circular orbit. And at those altitudes satellites move at a little over 7km/s.
- spacetracks 2mo agoIt defaults to 25x. At 1x it looks like nothing is happening.
- spacetracks 2mo agoFormer LeoLabs engineer ama
- JackMorgan 2mo agoI just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later. https://www.spacebook.com/ https://www.spacebook.com/
- netsharc 2mo agoMan, in some ways this is a future Star Trek envisioned: a display showing you a planet's orbital hardware and its launch sites... But the sad reality many of the hardware is Elon Musk's ejaculation stains, polluting the skies.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ge96 2mo agocool glad it has fast forward
- scanny 2mo agoUnfortunately the share button doesn't seem to save the state fully, the sensor selection/bookmarking doesn't carry through. Cool app though, have it on a large screen at our work to visualise the constellations we work with as a fun screensaver type thing.
- Stancyhd8 2mo ago[flagged]
- Nancy934 2mo ago[dead]
- k__ 2mo agoStrange, there aren't even 20 at a time above Germany. How many uplinks can one satellite handle?
- Joswalda 2mo agocould you use it to make an ultra small (focussed) sat dish?