What satellites are above me right now?
Stand in any parking lot in America and look up: within your horizon, right now, there are several hundred spacecraft. You can't see them — daylight, distance, or shadow hides them — but every one has a name, a catalog number, and a published orbit. WhatsAbove computes the whole set for your exact location, live, in your browser. Here's what's actually up there.
How we can know this at all
Space is the most surveilled commons on Earth. The US Space Force's 18th Space Defense Squadron tracks every object bigger than roughly a softball with radar and optical telescopes, and publishes each one's orbital elements — the famous TLE (two-line element set) — through CelesTrak. Feed a TLE into the standard SGP4 propagation model and you can compute where that object is at any moment, to within a few kilometers.
That's precisely what the SPACE tab does: your browser downloads current element sets, propagates thousands of orbits in a background thread, and plots everything above your local horizon on a zenith-centered sky chart — center is straight up, the edge is your horizon. The count updates every couple of seconds as objects rise and set. No server tracks you; the math runs on your device.
What the population looks like
Starlink: the majority
SpaceX's internet constellation is by far the largest fleet in orbit — thousands of active satellites around 340 miles up. At any moment they're the bulk of what's over you, moving in tidy orbital planes. On the scope they render as dim cyan beads; the Starlink filter isolates them, and fresh launches show up as connected bead-string trains.
Space stations
The ISS and China's Tiangong — the only crewed objects. Both orbit around 250 miles up and are easily visible at dusk/dawn when overhead. The Stations filter shows exactly when.
Everything with a job
GPS and its cousins (12,500 miles up — above the scope's LEO crowd but tracked in the full catalog), weather satellites, Earth-imaging constellations photographing your neighborhood daily, communications relays, science missions, and a healthy population of military payloads from a dozen countries — some with published orbits and classified purposes.
The museum pieces
Orbits don't expire on schedule. Vanguard 1, launched in 1958, is still up there — the oldest human object in space. Cold-War spy satellites, dead weather birds from the 70s, spent rocket stages by the hundreds: click an anonymous dot on the scope and the card might read "Launched 1967 — 59 years ago." A significant slice of what's above you right now predates the internet.
Reading the scope
- Position on the disk: center = directly overhead (elevation 90°), edge = horizon (0°). Compass letters mark the directions.
- Brightness of the dot: closer objects render brighter — a proxy for how prominent they'd look if visible.
- The card: name, NORAD ID, international designator (which encodes launch year), current altitude in km, speed (LEO objects do ~7.5 km/s — 17,000 mph), whether it's currently sunlit, and its next visible pass from your location if one is computable.
- Filters: All loaded · Starlink · Stations · Visible tonight · Just launched — plus a full-catalog option (~12,000 objects) if your device is up for it.
"Visible tonight" — the honest filter
Most satellites over you are invisible: either it's daytime, or the satellite is inside Earth's shadow, or it's simply too small and high. Naked-eye visibility needs the dusk/dawn geometry — you in darkness, satellite in sunlight. The Visible-tonight filter applies that test live: sun more than 6° below your horizon and the object sunlit. What remains is your actual observing list, and the Tonight panel turns it into appointments: pass times, directions, and durations for the bright ones over the next 12 hours.
Why the count keeps climbing
The catalog has roughly quadrupled since 2019, driven by cheap launch and mega-constellations. More than a hundred new objects enter the catalog in a typical month — which is exactly what the Just launched filter watches (everything cataloged in the last 30 days). Whatever the number over your head is right now, it will be larger next year. It's a strange, real fact of modern skies — and now you can watch it happen, live, from your own address.
Frequently asked
How many satellites are above me at any moment?
From any point in the US, several hundred cataloged objects are above the horizon at once — the exact live count for your address is what WhatsAbove computes. Most are Starlink; the rest are other constellations, science and weather satellites, military payloads, and decades of debris.
Can I see any of these satellites with the naked eye?
Only a fraction. You need the satellite sunlit while your sky is dark — a dusk/dawn window — and it needs to be large or low. The ISS is easy; fresh Starlink trains are easy; most of the rest need binoculars or a camera.
How does WhatsAbove know where every satellite is without tracking them live?
Orbits are predictable. The US Space Force publishes each object's orbital elements (TLEs), and standard orbital mechanics (SGP4) propagates them to any moment with good accuracy. Your browser does this math locally for thousands of objects, live.