A live sky wallpaper for Mac that follows your city

A space wallpaper can be a beautiful picture without telling you anything about the sky outside. Orbit for Mac is built around a more specific idea: the desktop shows the sky for a city you choose, at the time you are using it.

The stars, planets and Moon have positions. Daylight changes into twilight and night. When a predicted visible ISS pass comes along, the station crosses the desktop. You can keep working with the scene behind your windows, then open a short briefing from the menu bar when you want details.

This clip shows the ISS crossing a New York sky, drawn by the app's own renderer. It is a demonstration sequence, not today's live pass and not a camera feed.

Choose the city whose sky you want to see

The location is part of the picture. A sky calculated for another city can look convincing while being the wrong one for you.

Choose a city from Orbit's list, or use Location Services to set the location. Choosing a city is enough if you would rather not grant location access. The Mac app keeps the coordinates on the machine; its sky calculations do not require uploading them to our server.

Then choose which direction the desktop faces: north, east, south or west. You can switch constellation figures and labels on or off. Labels are useful while learning a patch of sky; switching them off leaves a quieter desktop. Neither choice changes where the underlying objects belong.

This is a calculated view over a drawn horizon. It cannot tell you whether a building, a tree or cloud outside your window is blocking an object. Use it to understand what is up and where, then check your actual view.

Watch what changes between day and night

In ordinary use, the sky is a still image that redraws once a minute. The Sun changes its position, twilight colours move with it, and stars become part of the night scene. The Moon follows its phase and orientation. The app can draw constellation figures, the naked-eye planets and the Milky Way.

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Orbit for Mac daytime wallpaper with a blue sky, the Sun and a layered illustrated horizon.

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Orbit for Mac night wallpaper showing constellation lines, Saturn and Fomalhaut above south-facing compass markers.

The small movement over a working hour is the point. You do not have to watch an animation continuously to notice that evening is arriving. The visual changes are tied to the calculated scene, rather than a decorative loop starting over every few seconds.

Our Mac product page shows the day, sunset, night and briefing-card screenshots together. Use those to judge whether the level of detail suits the way you keep your desktop.

Preview a pass without waiting for one

Open the briefing card and use its gold preview button to see the next pass cross the desktop in twelve seconds. That is a preview, so the condensed motion should not be read as the real length of the pass.

During an actual predicted visible pass, the station is shown as a bright point with a short trail, and the scene turns to face the pass. The menu bar indicates that the ISS is overhead. Outside that window, you should not expect a station permanently circling the wallpaper.

If the next visible pass is several days away, that alone is not a malfunction. The ISS must pass your location under suitable lighting conditions. Our guide to the station's dawn-and-dusk visibility explains the geometry behind that waiting period.

For an outdoor sighting, recheck the day's prediction and allow for your horizon and weather. A renderer preview demonstrates the interface; it does not establish that a particular pass will be visible from your garden.

Open the Moon in the menu bar for the details

The menu bar icon uses the Moon's current phase. Click it to open the briefing: sunset and darkness, the Moon, useful planets, the next visible ISS pass, the next launch and space weather.

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Orbit's menu bar briefing over a sunset desktop, with Los Angeles selected and sections for the Moon, ISS pass, planets, launch and space weather.

Read the source-age lines as well as the values. Orbit uses public feeds for the station's orbit, launch schedules and the Kp index. A feed can be delayed, and a launch can move. The age of the information helps you decide whether to refresh or check the original source before making a plan.

Notifications are optional. The Mac app has separate switches for the ISS, launches and the aurora outlook. Turn on only the reminders you want. A notification about a possible aurora is an invitation to check conditions, not a guarantee of seeing one.

What about battery and CPU use?

Orbit's normal wallpaper cadence is one redraw a minute. During a pass, a separate small layer carries the station's motion. The app also pauses drawing when the desktop is hidden, such as behind a full-screen app, on the lock screen or while the display sleeps; it has a low-battery pause as well.

Our published measurements on an Apple silicon Mac mini were under 0.1% CPU at idle and roughly 25 MB of memory, rising to about 33 MB with the briefing open. Those are measurements from that machine, not a promise for every Mac or a battery-life benchmark. The useful check on your own setup is ordinary use with the windows and displays you normally have open.

Check the platform before buying

Orbit: Live Sky Desktop supports macOS 15 or later, on both Apple silicon and Intel. The advertised US price is $6.99 once; the Mac App Store shows the current price for your region. It is a separate app and purchase from the free Android version.

The Mac app does not require an account and has no advertising or analytics SDK. This website uses anonymous visit and interaction measurement, separately from the app. For a hands-on pocket interface with the 3D solar system and Time Machine, see the Android video tour. For the sky behind your workday, start with Orbit for Mac.