Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

by rolph • 9 days ago

165 100 9 days ago

cool site! i appreciate satellite trackers and sometimes leave satellite.love up in the background in orbit mode with the music on at home.

Eduard• 9 days ago

the geosynchronous satellites fall on and bounce off earth

delichon• 9 days ago

If you zoom in you can see them moving. Click on them to see their tracks. I'm surprised how random the orbits seem. It's too cloudy at the moment but maybe on a clear night I can check the accuracy by looking up.

killjoywashere• 9 days ago

With clear, dark skies, you definitely can.

Quiza12• 9 days ago

Seeing them "slowly" move (but in reality incredibly quickly) reminds me of reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_(novel)

ultimoo• 9 days ago

are their orbits and trajectories computed ahead of time to avoid collisions?

bagels• 9 days ago

Yes.

rolph2• 9 days ago

its not the most intuitive setup but theres a lot of info available.

click on a dot and it will show up on a list to top left, click on an item in that list and you get a flyout menu to the top left with a bunch of data regarding the satellite.

philipwhiuk2• 9 days ago

Generally orbits are predicted many circumnavigations out, with manoeuvres being necessary to handle crossing paths and orbital decay from atmospheric drag.

ikari_pl• 9 days ago

I'm surprised that getting our low space to this state was even legal

vachina5• 9 days ago

US runs the show. Anything is possible.

signatoremo• 9 days ago

If that was true China wouldn’t be able to launch as much as they have done

vixen99• 8 days ago

Meanwhile: Is this true?

'Secret military documents from clandestine forums between Russia and China have revealed a possible joint strategic plan to disable Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network alongside a deep weapons development partnership spanning hypersonic missile defense and autonomous drones, The Insider reported on July 9.'

https://meduza.io/en/news/2026/07/09/russia-and-china-discus...

iknowstuff• 9 days ago

There’s a lot of space in space. This is not to scale.

krige• 9 days ago

There's a lot of space in air, and yet we have multiple midair collisions every year.

Dig1t• 9 days ago

Why would it be illegal? There are virtually zero drawbacks and huge advantages to these satellites. They are not rendered to scale either, in reality they are minuscule compared to the amount of available space. There’s room for millions more spacecraft.

sfblah• 9 days ago

I think it's fair to classify the advantages as "modest" not "huge." Yes, it's cool that sailboats in the middle of the Pacific can get Internet, but the vast majority of Internet users are still connected via fiber or copper. And, arguably, the existence of Starlink could enable governments to cease the rollout of terrestrial Internet, which is a modest drawback to the technology.

I've also seen reports that, as the satellites become overburdened, speeds are pretty variable. Again, not saying it's a net negative, but I just don't think there are "huge advantages" to Starlink.

ruszki2• 9 days ago

Huge advantages maybe in the future. Not now.

I’m thinking buying a camper van, and just travel through the world. Except I need internet, everywhere.

There are no such options. Starlink is the best, but there are two main problems with it:

- In the countries where it would be the most useful, it’s not allowed to be used (Garmin has the same problem with their Fenix 8 Pro, their availability maps are a joke) - You need to go back to your “home” country every other month (there is a non legal, thus risky, option to circumvent this for now)

So, that huge advantage is not here yet at all.

po1nt3• 8 days ago

I'm sometimes baffled how people's knee jerk reaction is to think how to ban this. And yet those same people complain about their parents that claimed that Rock'n'Roll or DnD should be banned because it's satanic.

This is literally the coolest thing we as a species achieved that doesn't serve self-preservation purposes.

vachina5• 8 days ago

Problem is this capability is concentrated in the hands of

1. A private company.

2. Of a single country with inconsistent leaders.

I’d be less anxious if Europe had this capability instead.

TheArcane• 8 days ago

This is literally the coolest thing we as a species achieved that doesn't serve self-preservation purposes.

couldn't be more wrong

dtagames• 8 days ago

It was never "legal" but it wasn't specifically illegal either.

Space-based businesses are hoping to grandfather themselves in once laws are established about the use of space, and betting that by then whatever service they offer will be seen as indispensable.

Svoka2• 8 days ago

That is not how orbital mechanics work.

hn111• 9 days ago

Half a year ago, I captured a photograph of a long train of satellites. However, when I navigate to that location using this tool, I don’t see any satellite train present at that specific timestamp.

I wonder if there are other satellites not included in this dataset, or if I should search way further from the location on the map

kortilla2• 9 days ago

A lot of the trackers miss the trains because trains occur within the first few orbits after a launch. So if they don’t start recording data until some delayed event, they miss it. I had this problem a lot with live night sky trackers not showing the trains despite me seeing them quite clearly.

voidUpdate• 9 days ago

It might also be taking the latest TLEs for satellites, I don't know if there's a database of historical TLEs, so it would only show the current orbit

scrollop• 9 days ago

Why are there demarcations towards the poles where the satellite density drops off? Seems Norway, Sweden and Finland have a much lower density of satellites .

gbalduzzi• 9 days ago

I wanted to ask the same thing.

There are two clearly demarcations both north and south

rolph2• 9 days ago

polar orbits are hard, you have to take a big oblique track dipping into the lower lattitudes to run a trajectory that allows you to counter gravity.

the anti collision manuevers are hard as well.

orbits are simpler at lower lattitudes where you run a trajectory, close to parallel to the equator.

dredmorbius3• 8 days ago

Populations are also far lower than at lower latitudes.

This affects both commercial potential (fewer possible subscribers) and bandwidth congestion (dittos). For both you'd want fewer birds in those orbits, and orbital dynamics only strengthen the argument.

peddling-brink• 9 days ago

My understanding, and I’m not a rocket scientist, is that it’s easier to launch east/west and it costs a lot of delta v to move into a polar orbit.

kortilla2• 9 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_inclination

In order to cover those northern/southern extremes, more expensive high inclination orbits are required (in the US these are launched from California). They are more expensive because you’re no longer getting the rotational velocity of the earth for free in your orbital velocity.

So for a LEO constellation you want to minimize the launches to high inclinations and keep the bulk in those juicy easterly ones.

xpct• 9 days ago

That's the first thing I noticed as well. Does that mean Africa and South America will have Starlink internet before Scandinavia?

namuol• 9 days ago

That big zoom-out of Earth in the opening sequence of WALL•E comes to mind.

figgy99• 9 days ago

Nice site but personally I like satellite.love more and satellitetracker3d.com is cool too, there's about 500 of these all with varying features.

saastester• 9 days ago

That’s a good point. I understand why satellite.love stands out in terms of atmosphere—it’s the app I’d leave running in the background. Satellite Tracker 3D seems more straightforward when I want to take a closer look at a specific object, while satellitemap.space offers the most comprehensive features once you get used to its somewhat cluttered user interface. So I don’t think there’s a clear winner; each of these apps is optimized for atmosphere, user-friendliness, and data depth, respectively.

kklisura• 9 days ago

Just thinking out loud: given that we know positions of these satellites, is one able to use it for non-gps navigation? Either by using vision - by tracking or by using some electromagnetic specter - listening to satellites...

gspr• 9 days ago

Sure, if you're able to accurately determine angles between the Earth's tangent at your location and the satellites. That's how you'd navigate using the sun, moon and stars. I suspect those natural celestial bodies are much less of a hassle than man-made satellites.

This contrasts greatly with actual GNSS – the whole point of GPS and the others is that you don't need to determine those angles. The only thing you need to determine is the signal delay (i.e. distance) from a few satellites. That's a lot more convenient.

zipy1242• 9 days ago

Not an expert but I imagine the problem with using vision is the problem of angular error propagation. That is the angle-> distance error problem:

linear error≈Rtan(Δθ)≈RΔθ

Here linear error is the error in position, R is the distance from the observer to the target and θ is the angle error. You would need incredibly good optics and resolution to minimise angular error and thus linear error.

_diyar• 9 days ago

Yes but the errors would be uncorrelated and if you could use many different measurements you should be able to estimate with reasonable certainty.

jcims2• 9 days ago

Yes

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/05/starlink-blocks-acce...

wildzzz• 8 days ago

Not impossible but it's not as easy as dedicated GNSS satellites. The ranging codes in a GNSS signal are what makes it easy to find your distance from the transmitter. Starlink doesn't have that, there are some observables you could use but it's not simple.

https://navi.ion.org/content/72/1/navi.685

petarb• 9 days ago

Just wow, I didn’t realize there’s that many star link satellites in orbit.

philipwhiuk2• 9 days ago

It's deeply misleading to mis-represent the size of satellites at this point.

jcims2• 9 days ago

Yeah if the lower 48 states (~2800 miles) span the width of my entire screen (2560px), each pixel represents just over a mile. The satellites at that level were rendered with dots that are ~3px or just over 3 miles/.1% of that width.

The Starlink v2 is 100ft on it's longest dimension. This means that the actual size of the satellite relative to the dot is on the same order of magnitude (.6%) as the dot is to the size of the US when it takes up my entire screen.

greengreengrass• 9 days ago

Nice site, but I'm really missing any altitude reference for the satellites. It's hard to use any satellite tracker with any degree of utility other than as a toy website when it's exceedingly difficult to determine and compare basic altitude information across different satellites.

beklein2• 9 days ago

To get a better sense of the scale, if you are viewing this app on a 4K display, with the planet measuring about 2,000 pixels across Earth’s diameter is approximately 12,742 km (7,918 miles), so each pixel represents about 6.37 km (3.96 miles).

A Starlink satellite is roughly 6 m (20 ft) wide without its solar panels. This means a one-pixel satellite marker is shown at roughly 1,000 times its true size. So even if this image already looks extremely crowded, the dots are still massively exaggerated. Visually, there would be roughly another factor of 1,000 before the satellites themselves were shown at their true scale—although this does not mean that orbit could easily accommodate 1,000 times more satellites but I guess there is still some space in space.

webdoodle• 8 days ago

Whether the pixels are not representative of actual size, seems like putting lipstick on a pig. When I look up at night, I can't see the night sky without several satellites interrupting my view. Even a brief 10 second glance, will produce at least 1.

Their is no communication need that is greater than our need to understand space and space weather. If the satellite operators can't stop destroying the night sky, their launch permission should be removed, so as their old satellites fall, new ones won't be allowed to launch.

Further, if the federal government won't intervene (looking at the U.S. because Starlink). Then states should make those satellite receivers illegal.

SiempreViernes2• 8 days ago

There's already so many starlinks in some bits of LEO that a single sat breaking up will lead to a runaway chain reaction that breaks up everything in that orbit quicker than the debris will decay out of it:

The results indicate the current population of intact objects exceeds the unstable threshold at all altitudes between 400 km and 1000 km and the runaway threshold at nearly all altitudes between 520 km and 1000 km.

https://conference.sdo.esoc.esa.int/proceedings/sdc9/paper/3...

beklein2• 7 days ago

Thanks for sharing the paper, it seems my intuition on size was bad but also my intuition on max satellite density for LEO was wrong.

bdavbdav• 9 days ago

Funny the location of the ground stations. Very odd clustering.

inemesitaffia5• 9 days ago

Use starlink.sx instead

iamacyborg• 8 days ago

I always like looking at this one https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization

nchmy• 8 days ago

i just clicked on one satellite and followed it as it moved. it crossed a continent in like a minute. Is that accurate? Seems too fast.

Moreover, are the satellites all moving around like that, haphazardly?

Svoka2• 8 days ago

there is a default three.js control panel. By default it has speed at 25x and 'Follow Earth' checkmark, which makes camera do weird things.

connicpu• 8 days ago

It's not haphazard, it's a circular orbit. And at those altitudes satellites move at a little over 7km/s.

spacetracks2• 8 days ago

It defaults to 25x. At 1x it looks like nothing is happening.

spacetracks2• 8 days ago

Former LeoLabs engineer ama

JackMorgan• 8 days ago

I just released a new update to mine yesterday with ranges and the ability to make a story of multiple saved scenes. Then they can be played back at a presentation later.

https://www.spacebook.com/

netsharc• 8 days ago

Man, in some ways this is a future Star Trek envisioned: a display showing you a planet's orbital hardware and its launch sites...

But the sad reality many of the hardware is Elon Musk's ejaculation stains, polluting the skies.

ge96• 8 days ago

cool glad it has fast forward

scanny• 8 days ago

Unfortunately the share button doesn't seem to save the state fully, the sensor selection/bookmarking doesn't carry through.

Cool app though, have it on a large screen at our work to visualise the constellations we work with as a fun screensaver type thing.

k__• 8 days ago

Strange, there aren't even 20 at a time above Germany.

How many uplinks can one satellite handle?

Joswalda• 8 days ago

could you use it to make an ultra small (focussed) sat dish?

Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

Related Stories