SpaceX's Starlink is the largest satellite constellation ever built. Thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, launching every few weeks. You can see them from your backyard — and OrbitalNodes tells you exactly when and where to look.
Starlink trains — the spectacular "string of pearls" visible after a fresh launch — are automatically detected and highlighted with plain-English directions. The tracker scans Starlink satellites every second and shows elevation, direction, altitude, and visibility status.
Best viewing is during twilight, the 30-60 minutes after sunset or before sunrise when the sky is dark but satellites are still catching sunlight at 550km altitude.
★ OPEN STARLINK TRACKERDuring twilight — roughly 30-60 minutes after sunset or before sunrise. At 550km altitude Starlinks need to be in sunlight while you're in darkness. Our tracker shows real-time visibility and tells you exactly when the next window opens for your location.
When SpaceX launches a batch of 20-60 Starlink satellites, they start in a tight formation that looks like a line of moving dots — a "string of pearls." Over the next 3-5 days they gradually raise their orbits and spread apart. Trains are most visible 1-3 days after launch and then disappear as the satellites reach operational altitude.
Individual Starlinks are magnitude 3-6 — visible to the naked eye in dark skies but not spectacular. A fresh train is more impressive as the eye naturally picks up a moving line of evenly-spaced dots. The ISS is roughly 100 times brighter than a single Starlink, making it far easier to spot.
OrbitalNodes is currently tracking thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit — that figure comes straight from live tracking data, so it is never out of date. Starlink is already larger than every other satellite operator in history combined and grows most weeks; alongside the active fleet, more satellites are always raising orbit, deorbiting, or already decayed as SpaceX continuously refreshes older hardware. The network is licensed to operate up to 15,000 satellites, with launches roughly every two to three weeks.
With thousands of satellites in orbit and growing, Starlinks create bright streaks in long-exposure telescope images and increase the overall brightness of the night sky. SpaceX has added visors and anti-reflective coatings to reduce reflectivity, and newer versions are darker than early ones, but the sheer volume of objects remains a fundamental concern. Professional observatories like Rubin/LSST are developing software filters specifically to remove Starlink streaks from astronomical images.
The ISS is a single large station at 420km altitude, bright enough to see from cities worldwide. Starlinks are small flat-panel satellites at 550km, much dimmer individually, and only spectacular in train formation shortly after launch. The ISS orbits at 51.6° inclination covering most of Earth; some Starlink shells are at different inclinations including polar orbits.
No — Starlinks are internet connectivity satellites. But the same orbital physics applies: large flat surfaces in LEO reflect sunlight during twilight. Reflect Orbital's EARENDIL-1 space mirror deliberately uses this to redirect sunlight. SpaceX's 1M satellite plan — OrbitalSolar.ai → covers space mirror technology in detail.
Most Starlink satellites operate in low Earth orbit at around 550 km (340 miles) — below the traditional broadband satellites in much higher orbits. During 2026 SpaceX began lowering roughly 4,400 of them from 550 km to about 480 km to cut collision risk and speed up the natural decay of any that fail. The lower a satellite orbits, the faster and brighter it tracks across your sky, which is why freshly launched Starlinks low on the horizon are the easiest to spot.
Each Starlink is designed for about a five-year working life, after which SpaceX uses its krypton ion thrusters to actively deorbit it. Coming down from low orbit, the satellite burns up completely in the atmosphere — they are built so nothing substantial reaches the ground. With over 10,000 now in orbit, several reenter every day, and the bright streaks people film and post online are usually exactly this: old Starlinks burning up, not a danger to anyone below. The reentry tracker shows what is coming down.