How to get ISS pass alerts on a Mac, now that NASA's space station emails are gone

NASA stopped emailing and texting people about space station passes on 12 June 2025, after twelve and a half years of doing it. A heads-up now comes from an app. On a phone or tablet that's NASA's free Spot the Station; on a Mac it can be Orbit: Live Sky Desktop, which I made. Switch its alert on and it warns you five minutes before each visible pass over your city, then draws the station crossing your desktop sky while it's up.

What happened to NASA's Spot the Station email alerts?

They ended on Thursday 12 June 2025. The service had started in November 2012 and would write a few hours before a sighting. NASA's notice on the old website, archived the day before, said the site's "viewing opportunities, text messages, and email notifications" would be discontinued from that date, and pointed everyone to NASA's Spot the Station mobile app. NASA's Spot the Station page and the app carry on.

NASA Watch, which printed the internal memo in May 2025, pointed out that texts mattered to people without much internet access.

NASA's FAQ says the app is free, with no in-app purchases or subscriptions, and notifies you only about passes you can see, for the place and timing you choose. Its App Store listing covers iPhone and iPad, not the Mac.

How can I get ISS pass alerts now?

NASA's Spot the Station app is the easy choice if your phone is never far away, and it shows the station live in 2D and 3D, with an AR view too.

Heavens-Above is a free website that lists the next ten days of passes for anywhere on Earth, with times, directions, heights and brightness in magnitudes (a lower number means brighter). It won't ping you, but you can copy a pass into Calendar on your Mac and give it an alert yourself.

On the Mac itself, Orbitrack from Southern Stars tracks more than 16,000 spacecraft in 3D, and ISS Live Tracker by Mark Bush maps where the station is right now. On Android, my free app Orbit alerts you 12 minutes before a visible pass and can leave out the low ones.

Can I get space station alerts on my Mac?

You can, with Orbit: Live Sky Desktop. It turns your desktop into the real sky over your city and keeps tonight's Moon in the menu bar. It's also the only Mac app I could find that draws the station on the desktop while it passes. Click the Moon for the briefing card. One tile is the ISS: the time of the next visible pass, above a little arc drawn as high as the station will climb.

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The top part of Orbit's briefing card for London on Tuesday 20 October: a starry strip with the city's name, then tiles for sunrise at 7:32 AM, a 64 percent waxing gibbous Moon, the ISS at 6:15 AM over a cyan arc marked SW to E, 63 degrees, and Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Five minutes before the station rises, Orbit sends a macOS notification titled "ISS rises in 5 minutes". For London's pass on Friday 23 October, as computed on 20 October, the line under it says "West at 5:30 AM, climbing to 77°. In view for 11 minutes, very bright." Five minutes, says a comment in my code, is "time to reach a window or step outside".

Clicking the notification opens the card. When a pass is under 20 hours away, the menu bar shows it beside the Moon too, as something like "ISS 6:15 AM".

An alert like this once pulled me out of a work daze; that story, and how big the station is, are in living with a real sky wallpaper.

How do I turn on ISS pass alerts in Orbit?

All of Orbit's alerts start switched off.

What counts as a visible pass?

You see the station only when sunlight hits it and your sky is dark, which is why passes bunch up around dawn and dusk.

Orbit checks each pass at the moment it's highest. The Sun must be more than 6 degrees below your horizon, the station must be in sunlight, and the pass must reach at least 10 degrees up. Every pass that clears all three gets an alert. Orbit looks four days ahead, and if nothing qualifies, the ISS tile says "No pass", with "in the next four days" under it.

The alert's last words come from how high the pass climbs, not from a brightness forecast: "very bright" from 60 degrees, "bright" from 35 and "low in the sky" below that. Height is a fair stand-in for brightness, though. Heavens-Above, which does estimate it, rates London's passes in the table below at magnitude −3.2 to −3.9, much brighter than New York's low ones at −1.3 to −1.6.

NASA says chances to see the station "can range from one a month to several a week". In practice they come in runs: in passes computed with Orbit for Mac on 20 October 2026, London gets six mornings in a row from 21 to 26 October, while Los Angeles, San Diego, Bengaluru and Tokyo get none. If you're in India, how to see the ISS from India has a table of passes for Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi and Kochi.

When can I see the ISS from my location?

Orbit's ISS tile shows the next visible pass for wherever you've set it, and NASA's app or Heavens-Above will do the same for any spot on Earth. To show what a week looks like, here's what Orbit 1.0 found on 20 October 2026 for three of its cities, from that morning's orbit data. Heavens-Above's London list agrees on the heights to within a degree.

The two time columns differ because a dawn pass rises in Earth's shadow. On Friday in London the alert comes at 5:25 AM and says the station rises in the west at 5:30, but at 5:30 there's nothing to see. It switches on at about 5:35, already high in the south-southwest, and sets in the east by 5:41. That's six minutes of seeing it, against the alert's eleven, which count from horizon to horizon.

Heavens-Above has New York's passes appearing a minute or two earlier than the table says, low in the north-northwest, because the two draw the edge of Earth's shadow a little differently. Go out when the alert comes and you'll be early either way.

London's clocks go back at 2 AM on Sunday 25 October, and the times allow for it. The further ahead a pass is, the more new orbit data can move it. The app fetches fresh data at most once a day while it's on screen, and when a pass moves, it replaces the waiting alert instead of adding a second.

Evening passes are kinder in two ways: the station is lit as it comes up, and nobody needs an alarm for 4:32 AM. Sydney's best pass of the next ten days falls just past the table, on Wednesday 28 October, when Orbit has it rising at 8:23 PM in the southwest and climbing to 81°. Heavens-Above has it at 81° too, but that's eight days past the orbit data I used, so check it on the day.

Can I track the ISS on my Mac desktop?

Yes, but only during a visible pass, and only while your desktop is in view. From rise to set the station moves across the desktop sky as a white-hot point in a cyan glow, with a tapering trail showing where it was over the last 12 seconds. It starts faint near the horizon and fades as it slides into Earth's shadow. On a dawn pass it appears partway up as it leaves the shadow, as it would outside. The rest of the time it isn't drawn at all: Orbit has no map of where the station is right now.

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A dark starry sky facing southeast with faint constellation lines. High on the left, a white point with a short cyan trail. To its right, Mars and Jupiter are labelled, with Regulus, Procyon, Sirius, Adhara and Betelgeuse labelled across the sky and E, SE and S marked along the dark hills at the bottom.

If the pass is in another part of the sky, the view turns to face it in one step and turns back afterwards, unless the direction you've chosen already shows the pass about as well as any. A pass that climbs above the top of the view, about 58 degrees up, slips off the top edge for its highest stretch, which will happen on most of the London passes in the table.

The station moves without waking the app, and on my Mac mini a 617-second test pass kept time to a tenth of a second (more on battery and CPU).

You don't have to wait for a real pass. While one is due in the next four days, the ISS tile has a gold play button in its corner. Click it and the desktop jumps to the pass, plays all of it in twelve seconds, then comes back to now. It plays on the desktop, so push your windows aside first. (You won't see it in the card picture above, which was drawn without a desktop to play on.)

What Orbit's ISS alerts can't do

The biggest limit is that Orbit plans alerts only while it's on screen. Every 15 minutes while its desktop can be seen (or, with Sky on the Desktop off, its menu bar Moon), it works out every visible pass of the next four days and hands macOS an alert for each, and macOS delivers those even if Orbit is hidden later. But nothing new is planned while Orbit is paused (behind a full-screen app, on the lock screen, with the display asleep or on battery below 20%), so a Mac left like that for days runs out of alerts.

Low passes get an alert too, marked "low in the sky", and 1.0 has no setting to skip them, unlike the filter in the Android app.

Orbit 1.0 knows nothing about weather, so it will announce a pass over solid cloud as calmly as a clear one. And the banner makes no sound, so it won't reach you if you're away from the screen.

Getting Orbit on your Mac

Orbit: Live Sky Desktop is $6.99 once on the Mac App Store (₹699 in India), with no subscription and no account. It needs macOS 15 or later, runs on Apple silicon and Intel Macs, and is about 1.4 MB. For that you get the real sky over your city on the desktop, tonight's Moon in the menu bar, the briefing card and the pass alerts. The screenshots are on the Mac page.