Space station, Tiangong and Hubble passes for your ZIP
Enter a ZIP for the next 7 days of visible passes: the minute each one rises, which way to face, how high it climbs, how bright it is and whether the sky should be clear.
Behind: the space station over Sedona, Arizona, just after sunset. “Space Station over Sedona” by AlphaTangoBravo / Adam Baker, CC BY 2.0
Before this page went up we ran the engine for Columbus, Ohio and set it beside Heavens-Above’s tables: all 7 visible space station passes from 13 to 18 October 2026 and all 9 visible Tiangong passes from 9 to 14 October, every start, peak and end within about a second, with the same directions and the same peak heights. The orbits are CelesTrak’s, read when you visit, and the sky cover is the National Weather Service forecast.
The station is the brightest of the 20 satellites in the list: a steady light that crosses from one side of the sky to the other in a few minutes. NASA has it “orbiting Earth about every 90 minutes” and says: “In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 orbits of Earth, traveling through 16 sunrises and sunsets.” Only a few of those orbits cross your sky in the right light each week, which is what the list above finds.
Passes come in the hours around dusk and dawn. NASA: “All International Space Station sightings will occur within a few hours before or after sunrise or sunset.”
The list gives the compass point where each pass begins and its highest point in degrees. “The horizon is at zero degrees, and directly overhead is 90 degrees.”
“The space station appears similar to an airplane or a very bright star moving across the night sky, except it does not have flashing lights or change direction.” It moves fast, too: “airplanes fly at about 600 mph (965 kph); the space station flies at 17,500 mph (28,000 kph).”
Many evening passes end in midair, as it slips into the earth’s shadow. “Satellites are only visible when they are lit by the sun, but the observer on the ground is already in darkness.”
The second station in the list orbits 41.5 degrees to the equator, about 386 km up, against the International Space Station’s 51.6 degrees and 420 km. It is smaller and fainter, but still easy to see: Heavens-Above rates it about 1.8 magnitudes fainter than the ISS at the same distance. With the lower tilt it can pass straight overhead only south of about 41.5 degrees north.
NASA dates Hubble from “its launch and deployment by the space shuttle Discovery in 1990” and gives its orbit as a “Low-Earth Orbit altitude of about 300 miles (261 nautical miles, or 483 km), inclined 28.5 degrees to the equator.” That low tilt keeps it in the southern sky over the northern states, which is why each state page shows how high it gets from three cities. It looks like a faint, steady star moving west to east.
14 of the 20 are rocket bodies, spent upper stages left in orbit, 11 of them SL-16 stages. They are fainter than the stations, so the list keeps them, with ACS3 solar sail, Terra and ADEOS 2, one tap down unless a pass is brighter than magnitude 1.5.
A string of lights moving together is a new batch of SpaceX Starlink satellites. Space.com: “When the satellites are first deployed, they appear as a close-knit group of lights in the sky, moving together in a straight line.” It does not last: “Soon after deploying as a train, however, the satellites climb to their operational orbit 340 miles (550 kilometers) above Earth and spread out from one another.” Spread out, they are faint and many; Space.com counts them this way: “As of August 27, 2026, there are currently 11,102 Starlink satellites in orbit.” So this list leaves Starlink out and keeps to the satellites you can find on purpose.
Each state page lists the week’s passes over three of its cities, shows how high the space station, Tiangong and Hubble can climb there, and names the darkest places nearby to watch from.
Pass times are computed in your browser with the SGP4 orbit model from CelesTrak’s element sets. Brightness and cloud are forecasts and can miss.