You can see the space station — tonight, maybe
The ISS is the third-brightest thing in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. It looks like a very bright star that moves steadily across the sky without blinking, taking about five minutes to cross. Aeroplanes blink and have coloured lights; the station does not.
When? Just after sunset or just before sunrise. That is when it is dark where you are but the station, high up, is still lit by the Sun. In the middle of the night it is in Earth's shadow and invisible.
Where? Use our What's Overhead page — it tells you exactly when the station will pass over your town, which direction to look, and how bright it will be. No telescope needed.
Starlink trains
Sometimes, a day or two after a Starlink launch, you can see a line of 20 or more little lights following each other across the sky like a string of pearls. They are brand-new satellites still close together. They spread out over a few weeks.
Watching a real rocket launch
Every few days, somewhere in the world, a rocket launches — and almost all of them are shown live on the internet. Our Mission Control page shows what is launching next and where to watch. The best moment is about a minute before lift-off, when the countdown gets to "T-minus 10". If you are lucky enough to live near a launch site — Florida, California, Texas, French Guiana, New Zealand — you can see and feel it for real.
Meteors — shooting stars
Shooting stars are not stars. They are bits of dust, often smaller than a grain of rice, hitting the air at 50 km a second and burning up in a flash. A few times a year Earth passes through a cloud of dust left by a comet and you get a meteor shower — the Perseids in August and the Geminids in December are the best. Lie on a blanket, let your eyes get used to the dark for 20 minutes, and you might see one every minute.
Things to look for with just your eyes
- The Moon — the craters along the line between light and dark are sharpest. Binoculars make it amazing.
- Venus — the brightest "star" in the evening or morning sky. It is a planet.
- Jupiter — bright and steady. With binoculars held very still you can see its four biggest moons as tiny dots in a line. Galileo saw them in 1610 and it changed everything.
- The Milky Way — from a really dark place, far from towns, on a moonless night: a hazy river of light across the sky. That is our own galaxy, seen from the inside.
- The northern (or southern) lights — our Aurora Forecast says when they might come your way.
Keep going
You have finished the first course. If you want more: the grown-up courses on this site start with Orbital Mechanics 101, which is the maths version of everything you just learned. Or try Space Tycoon, where you run your own space company. And keep looking up.