In live mode the console flies catalogued objects. This page collects the public telescopes, cameras and feeds that photograph satellites from the ground and from orbit, and the Earth from orbit. A picture is hosted here only where its licence allows it; everything else is a plain link to the photographer. Nothing on this page is a product screenshot.
The Space Station crosses the sky in a few minutes and the solar disc in under a second. The people and observatories here track it well enough to photograph it, which is the same pointing problem a power link has, solved in public.
NASA
The Space Station silhouetted against the Sun and the Moon, including during the 12 August 2026 total eclipse.
A transit is a pointing and timing problem: the photographer has to be on a line a few kilometres wide at a predicted second. That is the geometry a ground station lives by.
A stills camera on a tripod is not a tracking mount. The Station is resolved because it is large and close, not because the camera followed it.
NASA Image and Video Library
US Space Force
Deep-space surveillance of geosynchronous orbit. The facility is photographed; its data is not public.
This is what a national optical tracking network looks like: modest apertures, wide fields, and geography chosen to cover the whole geostationary belt.
GEODSS produces catalogue observations, not pictures. Nothing it sees is published as an image, so the photograph is of a dome.
Facility photographs on DVIDS
Bartosz Wojczynski
When and where the Space Station, Hubble or Tiangong will cross the Sun or Moon from a given location.
Every transit photograph on this page started here or somewhere like it. The prediction is the photograph.
A prediction is only as good as the element set it was computed from, which is the same caveat the console prints on every pass.
transit-finder.com
Statistical surveys of orbital debris from low Earth orbit out to geosynchronous, filling the longitude gap in the GEODSS network.
A 1.3 m telescope on a remote island, run autonomously, is the scale of optical ground segment a power-beaming operator would need for its own space-situational awareness.
MCAT counts and characterises debris. It is not a communications or power terminal, and it does not track a single cooperative spacecraft for minutes at a time.
NASA ODPO optical measurementsThe Space Station and visiting vehicles in close-up, and transits of the Sun and Moon, including with a Shuttle docked.
The canonical proof that an amateur instrument can resolve modules and solar arrays from the ground. If this is possible with one telescope, pointing at a cooperative spacecraft is not the hard problem.
These are single frames from stacked video, chosen from thousands. A power link has to hold pointing continuously, not pick the best moment afterwards.
astrophoto.frSpace Station close-ups with visiting vehicles, Tiangong, and the Space Station Photo of the Month from imagers worldwide.
The best single directory of people who currently photograph spacecraft from the ground, with their equipment listed. It is the map of who could be asked.
Hand-tracked Dobsonians work because the Station is bright and large. The same method would not find a small spacecraft at 1,000 km.
spacestationguys.comThe Space Station with Starliner and Crew Dragon docked, Tiangong, and other satellites, from a university station built for tracking and optical communication.
An Israeli optical ground station whose stated purpose includes satellite tracking and communication. It is the nearest thing in the country to the instrument a power link needs.
Optical communication and imaging need milliradian pointing; a power link at range needs microradian pointing and a receiver that can take the flux. Same mount class, different problem.
ISS imaged from Earth, Planetary SocietySatellite trails, identifications of unlisted objects, re-entries, and the original 2019 Starlink train footage.
What a small optical station actually does all night: astrometry, identification, orbit determination. It is the ground truth a catalogue is built from.
A trail on a fixed camera gives a position, not a picture. This is measurement, and the photographs are a by-product.
sattrackcam.blogspot.comMonthly surveys of geostationary debris to magnitude 21, and laser communication experiments with spacecraft.
This is an optical ground station that fires a laser at satellites. It is the closest public analogue to a power-beaming ground terminal that exists.
The laser carries data and ranging pulses at watts, not power at kilowatts. The link closes on a photon counter, not a receiver that turns the beam into electricity.
ESA Space Debris, scanning and observingText observations and identifications, including of unlisted objects, with links to member images.
Where the ground-based trackers publish first. A public catalogue of who saw what, when, is what independent verification of an orbit looks like.
Visual timing is accurate to a second and a fraction of a degree. It confirms a catalogue entry; it does not replace one.
satobs.orgCampaigns including a satellites programme that tracks artificial objects and their effect on the night sky.
A ready-made pathway for a reader who wants to track a satellite themselves tonight with an instrument they can buy.
A 114 mm aperture sees satellites as points. It will never resolve a spacecraft; it measures where the point is.
science.unistellar.comLive observing sessions and an education portal used by the Israeli Ministry of Education.
The Israeli entry point for a class that wants to look through a real telescope over the internet.
The instrument is built for deep-sky targets. Satellite work is possible on request, not the programme.
bareket-astro.comNon-Earth imaging is a business as of the mid 2020s: commercial spacecraft slew to image another object tens of kilometres away and sell the frame. The public examples are the sharpest pictures of spacecraft that exist.
NASA and SpaceX
The full Space Station from every side, photographed by the Crew-2 astronauts on departure, 8 November 2021.
The reference for what a large spacecraft looks like at close range: the arrays, the radiators, the scale of the structure a beam would have to land on.
This required a crewed vehicle to undock and fly a circuit. No new crewed flyaround was found for 2025 or 2026, so the reference is five years old.
NASA image article
The Space Station from 69 km, Tiangong assembly over time, and commercial satellites imaged for their operators.
Non-Earth imaging as a product: a small camera, many hosts, and a slew to a target at kilometres per second of relative speed. The pointing problem is solved at scale.
A 94 mm imager sees a spacecraft as a few pixels at tens of kilometres. It confirms shape and health; it does not resolve detail.
heospace.comThe Space Station, Tiangong and Hubble at down to four centimetres a pixel from tens of kilometres away, 2022 to 2026.
The sharpest public pictures of spacecraft from another spacecraft. They exist because an Earth imager that can slew is already a satellite imager.
These are the flagship imagers of a large company, pointed at the largest objects in orbit. The result does not generalise to a small camera on a small satellite.
vantor.comThe Space Station from 305 km in October 2025, and four frames of a WorldView Legion satellite from 40 to 50 km in September 2025, per secondary reporting.
Two operators photographing each other is what space domain awareness looks like from the outside. The pictures themselves are the message.
Neither the raw frames nor their metadata are public, so nothing here can be checked. The card exists to name the event, not to vouch for the pixels.
Secondary report, Universe MagazineLive 4K video of the Earth and the station structure, more than twenty hours a day.
The closest thing to standing on a spacecraft and looking out. Useful for seeing how fast the ground moves under a low orbit.
The stream is a product with its own player and terms. Embedding it would be the first third-party script on this site, so it is a link.
sen.comWeather and science satellites publish the Earth every few minutes under licences that allow anyone to host the file. These are the pictures that show what a receiving site sits under: cloud, which is the line-of-sight constraint the console models.
NOAA NESDIS STAR
The full disc of the Earth every ten minutes in sixteen bands, with GeoColor composites and lightning mapping.
Cloud is the line-of-sight constraint the console models for every station. This is what that constraint looks like from the satellite side.
A weather imager at 36,000 km resolves kilometres, not metres. It tells you a site is under cloud, not what the site is.
NOAA STAR GOES imagery
NASA and NOAA
The whole sunlit Earth, about a dozen times a day, from 1.5 million kilometres.
The only camera that sees the entire day side at once. It shows which hemisphere is illuminated, which is the other half of every power schedule.
From L1 the Earth is a few hundred pixels across. It is a picture of the planet, not of anywhere on it.
epic.gsfc.nasa.gov
Any place on Earth every few days, browsable without an account.
Ten-metre imagery of a candidate site, free to host. This is how a receiving footprint gets checked against what is actually on the ground.
Optical Sentinel frames are as cloudy as the sky was. For a site under persistent cloud the radar satellite is the useful one, and it is harder to read.
Copernicus BrowserLive Earth views and station operations when the crew is on duty.
The free version of the view from orbit, and the one whose footage may be recorded and reused with credit.
The older HDEV experiment ended in 2019 and most "ISS live" channels are rebroadcasts of this feed. Go to the source.
nasa.gov/liveEvery public NASA still and clip, searchable, with metadata and originals.
Where every hosted NASA image on this page came from, and where a reader can find the original.
Items with third-party copyright are mixed in and marked. The library being public domain does not make every item in it so.
images.nasa.govNot photographs, but the same catalogue numbers the console flies in live mode, drawn by other people. Go outside at the predicted minute and the point of light is there.
Jud McCranie, Wikimedia Commons
Sixty freshly launched satellites in a line, before they raise their orbits and disperse.
A constellation is visible to the naked eye for a few nights after each launch. This is what many spacecraft in one plane look like, which is the shape of a power fleet.
The train is a launch artefact. Within weeks the satellites are hundreds of kilometres apart and invisible without a prediction.
Starlink seen from Earth, Wikimedia CommonsWhen the Space Station will pass over a location, how high, and for how long.
The simplest way for a reader to see a spacecraft with their own eyes at a predicted minute.
One object. It does not show the rest of the sky the console draws.
nasa.gov/spot-the-stationWhere each NASA Earth satellite is now, and the measurement it is taking.
A well-made public view of a real fleet in real orbits, which is what the console constellation view is, for a different fleet.
It shows the NASA science fleet only, and it runs a heavy 3D application that this site will not embed.
eyes.nasa.govVisible passes of the Space Station, Starlink batches, Tiangong and anything else with a catalogue number.
The standard tool for going outside tonight. In live mode the console next-window panel links straight to the object it is showing.
Predictions are only as fresh as the element set. Newly launched or manoeuvring objects are wrong for a day or two.
heavens-above.comPosition, ground track and upcoming passes for any catalogued object.
The second tracker the console links to in live mode, so a reader has two independent answers for the same object.
Two trackers reading the same element set agree by construction. Independent confirmation needs an observation, not a second propagator.
n2yo.comAny catalogue group as orbits around the Earth, in a browser.
This is the console fleet provider. Seeing the same group drawn by its source is the cheapest cross-check available.
CelesTrak publishes element sets, not observations. It draws what it was given.
celestrak.orgFifty thousand objects, sensor coverage cones, and what a given radar or telescope can see.
The only public viewer that draws sensor coverage, which is the ground-segment half of the picture the console is about.
AGPL is a strong copyleft. Embedding or forking it into a product carries obligations the licence spells out.
keeptrack.spaceWhat a ground station does all day: passes scheduled, signals received, waterfalls published.
The best public picture of a ground segment as a network rather than a single dish, and the console roster grows from it.
Radio, not optical, and amateur bands. None of these sites could point a beam or receive one.
network.satnogs.orgEvery photograph above required an instrument to find a spacecraft and hold it for the exposure, from a rooftop, an island or another orbit. That is the pointing problem a power link starts from, and these are the instruments doing it today with published equipment lists.
DocumentedNo instrument on this page tracks a beam or receives one. An optical image of a spacecraft is not evidence that a link closes at a rectenna, and the ESA laser on Tenerife carries data at watts, not power at kilowatts. The mock fleet in the console, SOL-1 to SOL-36, is fictional and has no catalogue number, so no telescope has ever seen it.
Simulated