How to see the ISS from India: when, which way to face and how high to look

You can see the International Space Station from anywhere in India, a city terrace included, with no telescope. Get the pass time for your exact location from an app (Orbit, which we make, or NASA's Spot the Station), step out a few minutes early, face the direction it rises from and look for a bright light gliding across the sky without blinking. Visible passes only happen around dawn and dusk, in short runs with one to three weeks of nothing in between, so on most days there is nothing to see.

We build Orbit in Bengaluru (Bangalore), and the pass predictor inside it is our own code. The app was built with Claude Code and Codex, and Falcon wrote its physics engine himself. The times and heights below are for Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Kochi, worked out on 20 October 2026 with the app's own rules from CelesTrak's published orbit data for the station.

When is the ISS visible from India?

Only in the hours around sunrise and sunset. NASA's Spot the Station page says every sighting happens within a few hours before or after one or the other. Orbit is stricter, and lists a pass only if, at its highest point:

• the station is at least 10 degrees above your horizon,
• the Sun is more than 6 degrees below your horizon, so your sky is dark,
• and the station itself is still in sunlight.

Those last two overlap only when the Sun is down for you but still up for the station, about 420 km above you. Our guide to why the ISS is only visible at dawn and dusk draws that geometry.

So the station can fly over every day and still be invisible. Between 20 October and 3 November it climbs more than 10 degrees above Bengaluru 38 times, and not one of those passes can be seen: each comes in daylight, when the sky is too bright, or after dark, when the station is in Earth's shadow.

Then the pass times drift into dawn and dusk, and a run of visible passes begins (the same guide explains the drift). NASA puts the range for any one place at one viewing chance a month to several a week.

What does a run of ISS passes look like over India?

Here is one real run, 2 to 9 November 2026, for four cities. Each cell is a pass Orbit's rules accept: the time the station clears the horizon, its peak height, and the compass points where it rises and sets.

Date	Bengaluru	Mumbai	Delhi	Kochi
Mon 2 Nov, dawn			5:35, 25°, NW to SE
Tue 3 Nov, dawn			4:48, 15°, NW to E
Wed 4 Nov, dawn	5:40, 16°, N to SE	5:38, 18°, N to E	5:36, 83°, NW to SE	5:41, 10°, N to E
Fri 6 Nov, dawn	5:41, 80°, NW to SE	5:39, 82°, NW to SE	5:38, 19°, NW to S	5:42, 45°, NW to SE
Fri 6 Nov, dusk	7:00, 76°, SW to NE	7:00, 26°, S to NE	in shadow	6:59, 65°, SW to NE
Sat 7 Nov, dawn	4:54, 33°, NW to SE			4:54, 20°, N to SE
Sat 7 Nov, dusk	6:12, 42°, SW to NE
Sun 8 Nov, dawn	5:43, 19°, NW to S	5:41, 19°, NW to S		5:43, 29°, NW to S
Sun 8 Nov, dusk	7:02, 15°, W to N	7:02, 55°, SW to NE		7:01, 13°, W to N
Mon 9 Nov, dawn				4:55, 72°, NW to SE
Mon 9 Nov, dusk	6:13, 31°, SW to NE		6:17, 35°, SW to NE

The listed run opens with dawn passes, and dusk passes join from the 6th. Nothing is visible from any of the four cities before 2 November. Kochi's 10-degree pass on the 4th is a skim right at the cutoff, and Delhi's dusk pass on the 6th never gets going: by the time the station is 10 degrees up in Delhi's southern sky, it has gone into Earth's shadow.

Treat any table like this as a forecast. In September we worked out three weeks of Bengaluru passes, and the best of them was a pass of nearly 70 degrees on the morning of 10 October. By 5 October it had dropped out of fresh predictions altogether. That is why Orbit refreshes its orbit data whenever it is more than a day old and only looks four days ahead.

The table also misses passes, and that is our rule's fault. Orbit judges each pass at its highest point, so it skips passes that are sunlit for only part of the way: a dawn pass that comes out of Earth's shadow just after peaking, or a dusk pass that goes into it just before. Between 2 and 9 November that adds up to 15 short sightings across the four cities, against the 25 in the table, and most last under two minutes.

A few are worth stepping out for. Delhi's dawn pass on 5 November lights up about 46 degrees above the north-east horizon at 4:54 am and stays in view for about three minutes on its way down. Delhi's evening pass on 8 November comes into view 10 degrees up in the south-west at 7:06 pm and climbs to about 53 degrees before it goes dark. Bengaluru gets one at 5:00 am on 9 November, appearing about 40 degrees up in the south-west.

Why do Bengaluru and Delhi get different passes?

The station traces a narrow line over the ground, and how high it climbs in your sky depends on how far you are from that line.

Wed 4 Nov, about 5:40 am

The track runs over Delhi

Fri 6 Nov, about 7:00 pm

The track runs past Bengaluru

The line traces the point on the ground directly under the station, travelling the way the arrow points; dashed means it is in Earth’s shadow and invisible. Inside the darker band (about 230 km either side) the pass climbs 60 degrees or more. Inside the lighter band (about 540 km) it climbs 35 degrees or more.

With the station about 420 km up, the geometry works out like this:

• within about 230 km of the track, the pass peaks at 60 degrees or more (Orbit's Excellent);
• within about 540 km, at 35 degrees or more (Good);
• within about 1,400 km, at 10 degrees or more, the lowest pass Orbit counts.

Bengaluru and Delhi are about 1,740 km apart, too far for one pass to be high over both. On the morning of 4 November the track runs about 50 km from Delhi, which gets 83 degrees. Bengaluru, more than 1,000 km away, gets 16, and Kochi, almost exactly 1,400 km away, gets that 10-degree skim. On the evening of the 6th the track runs about 100 km from Bengaluru instead, and nearly 1,000 km from Delhi.

That evening also shows a second reason cities differ. The station slips into Earth's shadow a little after 7:05 pm, and that moment is the same for everyone watching, because it is the station itself going dark. Bengaluru and Kochi get their view before it. Delhi's part of the pass comes after.

If you are in Kerala, the Kochi column is the closest guide. Kochi and Bengaluru are about 370 km apart and often share passes at different heights. Inside one city the differences are small: across five spots in Bengaluru, from Kengeri to Whitefield and Yelahanka to Electronic City, the 6 November evening pass rises within about four seconds and peaks within about three degrees.

How do I find out when the ISS will pass over my city?

Use an app that works it out for your coordinates, and check it on the day.

• Orbit for Android (ours): free, no ads, no account. The Sky tab's Forecast lists the next visible passes with the time, the rise and set directions, the peak height and a rating from Fair to Excellent. Turn on alerts and it warns you 12 minutes before a pass: every pass, only Good and Excellent ones, or only Excellent ones. The calculations run on your phone, and the Play Store's data safety section reads "No data collected".
• Orbit for Mac ($6.99): the station crosses your desktop wallpaper during each visible pass, and an alert comes five minutes before it rises.
• NASA's Spot the Station app: the official one, free, and NASA says it works worldwide and sends push alerts.

Two apps won't always list the same passes, because each uses its own cut-off for what counts.

Which direction should I look for the ISS?

Face the compass point it rises from, then follow it. Read the direction together with the peak height, though, because two passes with the same label can cross very different parts of the sky.

In the November run above, every dawn pass rises in the north or north-west, and every dusk pass in the south, south-west or west. Other runs can differ, and the app gives the direction for each pass.

A. Fri 6 Nov, 5:41 am

Rises in the north-west, climbs to 80 degrees, close to straight overhead, and sets in the south-east. The station comes into sunlight at 5:42, when it is only about 5 degrees up, so you can follow nearly the whole pass.

B. Sat 7 Nov, 4:54 am

Also rises in the north-west, but in Earth’s shadow (the dashed part). It lights up at 4:57, about 20 degrees up in the north, peaks at 33 degrees in the north-east and drops to the south-east. It has the same “NW to SE” label as A, but it crosses a different part of the sky.

Expect a dawn pass to appear partway up rather than at the horizon. The station spends the start of many morning passes in Earth's shadow and lights up when it meets the sunrise, like pass B above, which switches on at about 4:57, some 20 degrees up in the north. Evening passes do the opposite and often fade before they set.

Your phone's compass is good enough in India. A compass points to magnetic north, not true north, but across India the gap (called declination) is small: about 1 degree in Bengaluru, 1.3 in Delhi, 1.5 in Kochi and close to zero in Mumbai, against about 13 in San Francisco. A degree is about the width of your little finger held at arm's length, which puts the error in these four cities at a finger and a half at most. Those figures come from the World Magnetic Model (WMM2025), which Orbit's Live view uses to correct for it and which NOAA says comes built into Android and iOS.

If the compass looks wrong, Google's Maps help says to move the phone in a figure 8 until the direction beam narrows. Without a compass, use the Sun: after dusk, the glow where it went down is roughly west, and before dawn the brightening sky is roughly east.

How high in the sky should I look?

Use your fist. Held at arm's length, a fist covers about 10 degrees, per NASA, and the horizon to straight overhead is 90 degrees: about nine fists.

Each tick is 10 degrees, about one fist held at arm’s length. A 35-degree pass peaks three and a half fists above the horizon; 60 degrees is six fists, two thirds of the way to straight overhead.

Low passes are the ones a city hides. A Fair pass that peaks at 15 degrees never gets more than a fist and a half above the horizon, and you need an open view in that direction to catch it: a terrace, a playground, a lakeside. A 60-degree pass clears almost anything.

Can you see the ISS from a city?

Yes. City light washes out faint stars, and the ISS is not faint. NASA once described an overhead pass as shining as bright as the planet Venus, and Venus is the brightest thing in the night sky after the Moon. A low pass is much farther away, though: at 10 degrees up the station is about 1,500 km from you, more than three times its distance overhead.

NASA's description doubles as the test for planes: it looks like a very bright star moving across the sky, except it has no flashing lights and doesn't change direction.

Will clouds or the monsoon block the view?

Cloud is the usual spoiler, and India has two rainy seasons to plan around. The southwest monsoon normally reaches Kerala around 1 June and covers the country by about 8 July, and this year the India Meteorological Department (IMD) declared it withdrawn from the whole country on 15 October 2026. The south then gets a second season. IMD's Chennai centre counts October to December as northeast monsoon time for Tamil Nadu, Kerala, coastal Andhra Pradesh, Rayalaseema and south interior Karnataka, the subdivision that takes in Bengaluru.

That puts our November run inside the south's second rainy season, while Mumbai and Delhi are past theirs. Keep Orbit's alert on and look at the sky when it fires, 12 minutes before the pass.

Is that bright light the Chinese space station?

It might be. China's Tiangong station also crosses Indian skies, and it is bright: Onmanorama flagged a naked-eye Tiangong pass over Kerala on 18 September 2026. Orbit predicts passes and sends alerts for the ISS only. A bright, steady light crossing at a time Orbit didn't list could be Tiangong, another satellite, or the ISS itself on one of the partial passes the table leaves out.