ISS — User guide

Live app · App user guide

Watch the International Space Station two ways at once: on the globe, on its orbit, and in the live video from its cameras. Both show the same moment: what the camera sees is under the ISS on the globe.

Turn it on from Menu → Extensions → ISS (URL ?extension=iss). The corner extension button (and E) cycles it like the other extensions.

Turn it on
What’s on screen
One clock
Gestures
Limits
Tips

Turn it on

Open the menu.
Extensions → ISS.
The screen splits: the Earth on one half, the live video on the other.
The clock goes live and the globe turns so the ISS faces you.

The video starts muted. The speaker button at the top right of the video turns the sound on and off, and your choice is remembered.

What’s on screen

Area	What it is
Orbit	A white ring around the Earth, about 420 km up. Brighter behind the ISS (where it has been), dimmer ahead of it. Orange where the stream is in replay (within 45 min of the clock). The part behind the Earth is hidden.
ISS	The station icon on the ring, labelled ISS. A small frustum drops from it to the ground: the area its camera sees, a 16:9 rectangle 200 km wide across the orbit, looking straight down. The picture lags the clock by 15 seconds, so the station icon (and its frustum) sits where the station was 15 seconds earlier. The yellow label under the globe names the place at its center. It is the frustum of the camera the video is showing: while Sen is on the front camera (pale magenta instead of yellow), it is that one's: 60° vertical, aimed along the direction of travel and lowered from the horizon (see `FRONT_YAW_DEG`, `FRONT_PITCH_DOWN_DEG`). Only the bottom of its view is drawn, a triangle from the station down to the ground, and a line around the ground it covers up to the horizon. Which camera is on air is read from the motion of the live picture (see "Which camera" below); where it is not known, the downward one is drawn. The Frustums switch of the eye button (off by default; also the Settings checkbox Show frustum) shows or hides it. The frustum is drawn only while the video is open: dotted for the camera's whole picture, plain for the part of it the video pane shows (it follows the crop and the pan of the video, and the pane's size). ISS camera view strips (off by default) show which camera the video was on: see "Which camera" below.
Ground track	Blue line on the ground: the path under the ISS over the last 12 hours, the span the video covers. Bright blue where it is day under the ISS, dark blue where it is night, with a 10-minute gradient at each sunrise and sunset. Its end is where the ISS is now. Click it (within about 100 km) to jump to the moment the ISS was there; the video follows. Where two passes cross, the sunlit one wins. Double-click still zooms. Fully visible zoomed out, fading as you zoom in, gone at max zoom.
Place	A line at the top middle of the video: the place the camera looks at, at the clock's moment (City, Country; only the country with the front camera, or the sea's name over water; the coordinates until the name is found). When the clock is in the past it adds how long ago (for example 2h34min ago). The label takes the color of the ground track there: bright blue by day, darker blue at night. It only shows while the video is live (where the last seconds are not read yet, the last known state is assumed for 5 minutes); with no signal it is hidden.
Horizon circle	Dashed circle on the ground around that point: what the ISS can see. Inside it, the ISS is above the horizon; on it, the ISS sits on the horizon. About 2,260 km from the center.
My location	The target button, the round button in the top corner opposite the menu button. The first tap asks to share your location (the browser asks). Your place gets a red circle of 100 km, and its name (City, Country; the state or province when there is no city) is in the button's hover text (the coordinates until the name is found). It then opens and closes the pass table (below).
Drag the ISS	Press on the ISS (or near it) and drag along its orbit: time follows your finger and the ISS goes with it, while the view stays put. Let go and the view turns back to the ISS, gliding when zoomed in.
Eye button	The round button under the target button. It opens a row of switches beside it: Frustums (with the dashed horizon circle), Ground track (with Sen's clips, the chat dots, the weather event dots, the camera view strips when Settings turn them on, and the timeline extras: the pass markers and Sen's coverage strip). Each one shows or hides its own layer; the ISS and its orbit are always shown, and by default both are off. The row drops its labels and keeps only the icons when there is no room for them in the Earth half of the screen, and scrolls sideways when even the icons are longer than the room before the menu (it fades to black at the edge). Your choices are remembered on this device. It and the pass table are never open together.
Sun view button	In the menu corner, under the ISS button: a sun, yellow when selected. It switches the globe from the view above the ISS (geostationary, as before) to the view from the Sun (from L1, or from DSCOVR where its EPIC pictures cover the time). The camera stands still in space, so the orbit of the ISS stands still and the Earth turns under it with the clock: drag the globe to scrub time, as far as the timeline goes (Now - 12 h to Now). Off when ISS opens. Settings: Sun view orientation, Ecliptic (default) or North, remembered on this device; it is the Orientation menu of the globe, for Sun view alone.
Pass table	Tap the target button and a table slides out of it toward the menu: two rows, the times of the passes of the ISS near you underneath, and Last pass and Next pass over them, each spread across its passes. Last pass: the times, in the last 12 hours the video covers, when the ISS came within 200 km of you while the video was live (a pass during a replay, when Sen had lost the signal, is not listed). Tap one to play it from 30 seconds before the closest approach. Next pass: the next passes, within 300 km of you, in the coming 7 days (12 at most). Tap one to add it to your Google Calendar: Google Calendar opens with a reminder one minute before the pass, and you press Save. The app never sees your calendar. Each time is colored by the light at your place: for the last passes the blues of the ground track (bright by day, dark at night), for the next passes teal, bright by day and darker at night. The soonest next pass also shows the stretch of its track 3 minutes before and after the closest approach on the globe, pale green by day and dark green by night (click it to add it to the calendar too), and it and the last pass are marked on the timeline. The table fades out before it reaches the menu: swipe it sideways to see the rest. Tap the target button again to close it.
Live video	Sen’s 24/7 4K stream from cameras on the ISS. Landscape: half the screen, beside the Earth, on the right, the globe on the left (Settings: Globe position (landscape) puts the globe on the right). Portrait: below the globe (Settings: Globe position (portrait) puts the globe down), sized to the video’s 16:9 shape. The split is there exactly while ISS is on (no ×), but you can drag the divider to resize it. By default the video fills the full height of its half, cropped at the sides: dragging over the video pans it sideways. The button in its top-left corner switches to the full width of the half (nothing cropped), and back. Switching and resizing both ease smoothly, zooming around the center of the picture. A tap on the video plays / pauses. YouTube picks a sharper resolution as the picture gets bigger.
Floating window	The × in the video's top-right corner (or dragging the divider to the video's edge) puts the video in a small window over the globe, with the place line under it. Drag it by its top strip, resize it by its corner; its arrow (or dragging the divider back) puts the video in the split again.
Fullscreen	The button beside the fit button gives the whole screen to the video, shown whole; on a phone the screen turns to landscape (on iOS, where that cannot be forced, the picture is turned 90°). Press it again to leave, which brings the split back. (Dragging the divider to the video's edge still gives the globe the whole screen.)
Gyro pan	On a phone held upright, whenever the video fills the full height (in the split, fullscreen or while writing in the chat) (the fit button, so its sides are cropped), turning the phone pans the video as if the screen were a window onto it: the whole width of the video spans 60° of your turn. The gyro button beside the chat's lights up while it is on (it is, by default; press it to switch off, and the choice is remembered). Dragging with a finger still pans too. On iOS the first press asks for motion access.

One clock

The globe and the video run on one clock.

Live is about 20 seconds behind real time: that is how far the video stream lags. The globe waits for it.
Scrub the timeline (or use the keys, the date picker, Now): the video jumps to the same moment.
Seek in the video (its seek bar or its LIVE button): the globe jumps there.
Play / pause: there is no play button, the clock plays at 1 s/s all the time, with the live video. A tap on the video (live or a Sen clip) pauses it, and a tap again plays it.
Faster than 2×: the video cannot follow, so it shows a still of the moment about every second and a half.
When time jumps, the globe turns to put the ISS in front of you.

Gestures

Gesture	Action
Drag the globe	Turns it left / right. It stays where you leave it. A drag does not move time while ISS is on.
Drag up / down	Nothing (speed and day jumps are off while ISS is on).
Timeline	Scrub to move time. The video follows.
Click the globe	Nothing (the clock always plays).
Pinch / mouse wheel	Zoom around the point under your pointer (the midpoint of your fingers), as in the rest of the app; zoomed in, the view then turns around that point like a trackball. To zoom on the ISS, zoom inside the dashed circle around it (the ground it sees: its horizon): the ISS moves to the center of the globe as you zoom in, and back to where it was as you zoom out; the Earth slides under it, and the clock keeps running. Start the zoom outside the circle and it is the usual zoom, which pauses the clock.
Double-click	Inside the dashed circle around the ISS: zoom all the way in, with the ISS in the center. Double-click again to zoom all the way out. It never pauses the clock and never leaves the GEO view. Elsewhere on the globe it is the app's usual double-click (zoomed globe, zoomed map, map, globe).
Split divider	Drag it so the globe has less than half of the screen and the globe zooms in on the ISS by itself; give the globe its half back and it zooms out again.

Limits

12 hours back. The video keeps the last 12 hours. Time cannot go further back while ISS is on; the timeline stops there.
Not the future. Like the rest of the app, time stops at now (here, the live edge of the video).
Night. On the night side the video is dark, and so is the globe under the ISS.
Out of view. When the ISS is behind the Earth its marker is hidden. Drag the globe to bring it round.

Tips

Leave it playing at 1×: the ISS crawls along its orbit while the video shows the ground passing below. One orbit takes about 93 minutes.
Seek the video back to a sunrise or a storm, and the globe shows where it was.
Zoom in on the ISS marker to see the gap between the station and the ground (the frustum).

Weather events

Every storm, eclipse, smoke plume and mega / giga wildfire happening at the clock is a small icon on the globe: a vortex for a storm, the moon over the sun for an eclipse, puffs for smoke, a flame for a fire (shown with the Ground track switch of the eye button, off by default; Weather itself stays off). Hover a dot, or click it, for its name; Weather's Wikipedia and YouTube pages never open.

Click it to jump to the moment the ISS camera had that event in view: the pass nearest in time to the clock, within the 12 hours of video. It uses the camera that was on air then (the downward one where that is not known). The dot is colored like the ground track at that moment: bright or dark blue by day or night, bright or dark gray where it is not known yet whether the signal was live, orange for a loss of signal, where the click does nothing. A pale dot was not in view in the last 12 hours, and does nothing either.

When the video is a replay

When Sen loses the signal, its stream replays old footage, and the video no longer shows where the ISS is. ISS reads Sen's Live / Replay badge on the last 12 hours and marks the stretches that were not live in orange: on the ground track, and on a bar over the timeline (bright blue by day, dark blue by night, orange where there was no live video). Hover either one (desktop) for the time and, under it, Daylight, Night, Twilight or No Signal, in its color. The first time, it takes under a minute to read the 12 hours; afterwards only what is new. Where it has not looked yet, nothing is marked.

Which camera. Sen cuts between the camera looking down and the one looking ahead. In Settings, ISS camera view strips (off by default) draws it along the ISS's path, on the ground track, at every zoom, and as a second bracket on the timeline; the orbit line stays clean. The camera looking down is a pale yellow curtain, 400 km tall, standing up from the ground track. The front camera is a pale magenta strip, 400 km wide and flat, parallel to the ground, centered on the ground track. ISS tells them apart from how the picture moves between two frames 5 seconds apart: the ground slides by in one parallel move on the downward camera, and the front camera's picture hardly moves. Only where the video was live is it read, so nothing is drawn where the signal was lost. A dark picture (night, nothing to follow) is taken as the camera looking down. The frustum follows it too, with or without the strips: the yellow one while the camera looking down is on air, the magenta one for the front camera. Where the view has not been read (the newest minute or so of the video), the last camera seen in the 5 minutes before is assumed. Other views (the docked capsule, Sen's title cards) count as the front camera. It is read together with the live check, so nothing is fetched twice, and what was read stays stored: the next time only what is new is read. Sheets read before this feature are not read again, so the strips fill in as the 12 hours move on.

Sen's recorded clips (super-users only for now)

Sen also publishes short clips from the ISS cameras on sen.com, a few a day. For super-users (signed in with the account on the list), ISS draws each clip (the live orbit data covers ~10 days; an older clip is placed with the orbit data of its own day, kept in the same private database, as far back as that history goes: a clip it does not reach is kept, undrawn) as a teal, semi-transparent ribbon on the ground with a line along it, the line in the same blues as the ground track (bright blue by day, dark blue by night, the twilight gradient between, as thin as the track; only for a clip outside the 12 hours of live video, where the ground track is that line): the stretch of Earth the ISS flew over while that clip was recorded, 1 to 10 minutes of track, shown only while the clock is within 12 hours of the clip. The Filter button under the menu picks which clips show: chips for the natural features and events Sen tags them with (volcanoes, storms, auroras, sunglints, sunrises…), and Ground for the clips with none of these; the search box looks at titles, places and chip names. Paths and timeline brackets follow it, except for the clip that is playing, which is always shown. The recent ones lie on top of the blue ground track; older ones sit on earlier passes. They do not fade as you zoom in, unlike the track: they stay at full strength up to max zoom, and on the zoomed map too.

Age view: the clock-face button under the Filter button (its ring is the five colors below) switches from the usual view (only the clips within 12 hours of the clock) to every clip, whatever the date, off again on every page load, and it stays on while you play a clip (in the long-press mode with every track, the dots show while a clip plays). On the globe every clip is then just a dot in the color of its age, at the place Sen recorded for it: red under a day, orange under a week, yellow under a month, white under a year, gray older. Move the pointer close to a dot (on a touch screen, tap it once) to see that clip's ground track: its teal ribbon and line, with a thin (50 km) ribbon on each side in the age color, and its label. Click the dot (tap it a second time) to play the clip; the age view stays, and the playing clip's ribbon is brighter than the other near clips', with no age-colored ribbons beside it. The clips within 12 hours of the clock keep their plain teal ground track beside their dot (the age-colored ribbons show only for the clip you point at, and for every track in the long-press mode). A long press on the button shows every ground track at once, as in the usual view (the button gets a second ring), except while you point at a clip (or tap one): then the dots show, until you move away; another long press goes back to the dots. The timeline lists every clip too. The Filter's Age category (in the category menu, next to the search box) has one chip per color; they filter in both views. Choosing the Age category also turns the age view on; going back to the tags leaves it on.
Hover (desktop): the clip's title, place, date and length, and "Click to play".
Click: plays the clip from its start, wherever on its ribbon, line or bracket you clicked. A clip inside the 12 hours of live video is not opened in Sen's window: the live video jumps to its start instead. The clock goes there and the clip's title appears in teal at the top middle of the globe half, whether the Filter is open or not (with a link to its page; it wraps if long): you are held inside the clip (scrubbing past its ends stops there, the way the 12 hours of live video hold you) until you press the pale red Back to Live link under the title, or click the blue ground track or a last pass in the pass table. The clip opens in its own window, placed over the video half of the split (Sen does not allow its video to be shown inside ours yet; you can move or resize it) and the globe runs at 1 s/s next to it; the two start together, but pausing or seeking in that window is not seen here (Start together begins both again), and the clock stops at the clip's end. While a clip plays, the globe shows both frustums, the downward camera's (yellow) and the front camera's (magenta), since Sen does not say which one a clip was shot with. A click on the blue track where there is no clip still jumps to that moment, and a double-click still zooms.
Tap (touch): shows the same label above your finger, with Play (from the clip's start) and the link to the clip's page.
On the timeline, each clip is also two brackets in rows past the day / night and camera brackets (more rows where clips overlap): one colored by the light along the clip (the track's blues, like its line on the globe; none for a clip inside the 12 hours of live video, where the day / night bracket above says it), and a teal one with its label. A clip is a narrow tick on the 28-hour timeline: zoom the timeline out to see older ones. Each bracket is labelled with the clip's place, cut to 16 characters with an ellipsis. The nearest clip beyond each end of the visible timeline shows as a label at that end, with its date; the filter applies to these too. Mouse: hover a bracket, a label or an end-of-timeline label for the same bubble as on the globe, and click the item or the bubble to play the clip from its start (also for a clip beyond the visible timeline: the clock goes there). Touch: the first tap opens the bubble, a tap on the bubble plays the clip, and a press anywhere else closes it.
Ask: in the Filter's search box, typing searches titles, places and tags as you type. Write a question instead, for example auroras over Canada last month or volcanoes in October, and press Enter: it is turned into a filter: the tags it names become the tag chips (only those on), place and dates apply on top, and a line under the box says how it was understood. Emptying the box, typing again or turning the Filter button off ends the question and puts the chips back as they were. You can still click chips to adjust. Typing again goes back to the text search. A question looks through all the clips, the old ones too, so it switches the age view on (every clip shown as a dot colored by its age) and switches it off again when you clear the question. Logic words work, and the dialog shows how they were understood: Paris and London is Paris AND London (a clip must be at both), storms or auroras is Storms OR Auroras, volcanoes but not in Indonesia is Volcanoes AND NOT Indonesia, either volcanoes or islands, not both is Volcanoes XOR Islands. A question with no logic word at all (Turkey Israel) means AND. Say or type go live (or back to live, passe en direct) to return to the live video. Any place in the world works (I want to see Paris, volcanoes near Japan), and so does when did it pass over my place: the browser asks for your location then and uses it only on your device. In Chrome and Edge there is a microphone beside the box and an AI button (a sparkle) in the menu column under the Filter and age buttons: they are one switch. Press either and the microphone stays on: say a question, for example show me the latest volcano, and stop: about a second of silence ends the request and it is asked. Then ask another, as often as you like. A label next to the AI button says Listening…, then shows the words as they are heard; the Filter bar does not open by itself. Say thank you, done, that's all or close microphone (or press the button again) to turn it off. After each question the clip that fits best opens straight away, in front (if no clip is near the place you named, the nearest one opens and the dialog says how far it is; the label by the button always says what happened): the one with your words in its title, and the most recent among those. If it has to open in its own window, the browser will not do that without a click, so a small dialog first shows what you said, how it was understood, the clip proposed and why that one, and you press Open window; it stays up without blocking anything, and updates if you ask again. The browser's speech service hears the audio. If the question cannot be asked just now, the text search stays and the line says so.
Settings → Show Sen video paths switches them off (kept between sessions). Off means nothing at all is requested from Sen; on again, it picks up where it left off. Nobody else sees the setting or the paths. Not on a phone or tablet (touch screens: no hover, coarse pointer): there are no paths, no Filter or age buttons and no setting, because the popup that plays a clip does not fit.

The clips come from a database that a daily GitHub job fills: it asks Sen for each clip once, ever, and your browser only reads that database through our Worker (hourly while the tab is open, with a copy kept in IndexedDB senArchive); your browser never calls Sen's API. Only the ISS cameras' clips are shown, and only those an orbit can be found for (the latest orbit data, or the day's from the history of the ISS's orbit data we keep); the others stay in the database. The job uses Sen's public content API, which is not documented and which we have no permission from Sen to use yet: it is a private preview, nothing is copied or embedded, every clip is a link to sen.com.

Loss of signal. When Sen's stream replays old footage, the video slides out so the globe has the whole screen, and an orange note at the top of the globe says No video signal from the ISS. The note shows at once; the video slides out only when the stretch of no signal lasts 5 minutes or more (a shorter loss leaves the video as it is) and has held for 5 seconds, so a flickering signal does not make it flap. Tap View replay to bring the video back anyway (Hide video puts it away again). The video comes back by itself as soon as the signal is back, or when you jump to a live spot of the ground track.