The space station does not shine on its own. What you see is sunlight bouncing off it, and that takes three things at once: it has to be at least ten degrees above the horizon, it has to be in sunlight, and the sky where you stand has to be dark. That is why you only see it at dusk and dawn. In the middle of the night it is in Earth's shadow, and in the middle of the day it is lost in daylight.

That makes for seasons. For a few weeks it crosses Norway morning and evening and is one of the brightest things in the sky, brighter than any star. For other weeks it only passes in daylight or in shadow, and the table is empty. That is how it is meant to be.

Press My location to compute from where you are. Your location stays in your browser and is sent nowhere.

Altitude on the globe is to scale. The space station flies about 420 kilometres up, roughly the straight-line distance from Bergen to Trondheim, and that is only 6.6 percent of Earth's radius. Drawn true, it is almost touching the surface. Space starts closer than most people think.

Speed is what keeps it up. At 27,600 km/h it is falling towards Earth all the time, but moving sideways so fast that the ground curves away beneath it just as quickly. That is what an orbit is. It goes round in 92 minutes, 15.5 times a day, and the crew sees 15 or 16 sunrises every day.

The orange line is the next 92 minutes. It is not a ring: the Earth turns under the orbit, so every lap lands 23 degrees further west. The orbit is tilted 51.6 degrees to the equator, which is why the ISS never goes north of 51.6 degrees. From Bergen you see it low in the south. From Tromsø you almost never do.

Drag the globe to look around, and scroll to get closer. Ten seconds after you let go, the camera finds the station again. Click a dot to see what it is.

The red dot is Tiangong, China's space station, crewed since 2021. Its orbit is tilted 41.5 degrees to the equator, so it never climbs high enough above the horizon to be seen from Norway.

Press Starlink to see about 11,000 satellites, each on its own measured orbit. They all sit in a thin shell between 340 and 570 kilometres up, and there are more of them than all other active satellites combined. The 150 brightest is CelesTrak's list of objects large or shiny enough to see with the naked eye: old rocket stages, weather satellites and Hubble.

Measured: the orbits. The US Space Force tracks everything in orbit with radar and publishes orbital elements for every object, and CelesTrak groups them and refreshes them several times a day. We fetch them at most every three hours.

Computed: everything else, and all of it in your browser. Positions are SGP4, the model the elements are made for. The Sun, Earth's shadow and the darkness where you stand are worked out for every second of every pass. For the next few days the times are good to a few seconds. They get less precise the further ahead you look, because thin air slows the station down and its engines lift it back up.

Sources and licences. Orbital elements: CelesTrak, from the US Space Force catalogue. Orbit propagation: satellite.js (MIT). Earth maps: NASA-derived textures via ethanplusai/earth-moon-solar (MIT). 3D: three.js (MIT). The same globe as on the earthquake page.