Real pass predictions for Indian cities — when to go outside, which direction to face, and how bright each satellite will be. Times are shown in IST.
A satellite being above your horizon does not mean you can see it. Four conditions must hold at once: it must clear about 10° elevation, be lit by the Sun, your sky must be dark (Sun at least 6° below the horizon), and it must reach roughly magnitude 4.5 or brighter. Most trackers check only the first, which is why people look up and see nothing.
This page checks all four for every object in the CelesTrak catalogue. Navigation satellites such as GPS and NavIC are excluded because they orbit around fifty times higher than the ISS and are far too faint for the naked eye.
Pick your city, or share your exact location, and the page lists what is genuinely visible: the satellites optically visible at this instant, and every predicted pass over the next 36 hours. Each pass gives the start time in IST, the compass direction to face, the maximum height above the horizon, the peak brightness in magnitude and how long it stays in view. Passes within the next 48 hours can be added to a phone calendar with a reminder ten minutes before.
The overhead list shows the highest objects above your location at this moment together with the reason each one can or cannot be seen — below the horizon, inside Earth's shadow, lost in daylight, or simply too faint. This is the list most trackers publish and label "visible", and on most occasions almost none of it actually is.
The International Space Station is the brightest, reaching magnitude -3 to -4 and crossing in three to six minutes. China's Tiangong station is next. Beyond those, large Earth-observation satellites such as Terra, Aqua, the Sentinel series and the METOP weather satellites make regular naked-eye passes, along with spent rocket bodies. Starlink satellites are visible too, most dramatically as a train of lights in the days just after a launch.
Get outside about five minutes early and let your eyes adapt — dark adaptation takes ten minutes or more, and a phone screen resets it instantly. Face the direction listed as the start of the pass. Look for a steady point of light moving smoothly with no blinking; a blinking light is an aircraft. A pass marked as fading into shadow disappears mid-sky rather than setting.