Live Space Data, One Browser Tab Away
Where the space station is right now. Which asteroid is passing this week. What that smudge of sky actually contains. All of it is public, all of it is free, and none of it needs an account or an install. The hard part is not access — it is knowing which page answers your question. This is that map, starting with ours and being straight about where an agency does it better.
Start From the Question, Not the Tool
The reliable way through this is to decide what you want to know first and open exactly one page. Three of the six rows below are ours; the other three are agency portals we would send you to over anything we could build.
| You want to know | Open |
|---|---|
| Where is the ISS right now? Live position on a world map with latitude, longitude, altitude and speed. | ISS Tracker → |
| Is an asteroid passing close? Upcoming near-Earth close approaches from NASA/JPL data — size, speed, miss distance. | Asteroid Tracker → |
| What am I looking at up there? Pan and zoom the real sky using professional survey imagery. | Sky Explorer → |
| How many planets are out there? The authoritative catalogue, and the source of the count above. | NASA Exoplanet Archive → agency site |
| Will there be aurora tonight? The official US space-weather forecast, including the Kp index. We have no equivalent. | NOAA SWPC → agency site |
| I want the raw data A working demo key means you can paste a URL into the address bar and get live data back. | NASA Open Data & APIs → agency site |
The Three Trackers We Run
All three sit in the space tools hub. None of them asks who you are, and none of them needs a key.
ISS Tracker
The station’s live position on a world map, with latitude, longitude, altitude and speed as they update. It orbits roughly every 90 minutes at about 28,000 km/h, which is fast enough that watching the marker move is the point — the abstraction of “low Earth orbit” becomes a thing crossing an ocean while you look at it.
Asteroid Tracker
Upcoming near-Earth close approaches built on NASA/JPL close-approach data, showing each object’s size, speed and miss distance together. The miss distance is the column that matters and the one most coverage omits: a pass described as “close” is routinely several times the distance to the Moon.
Sky Explorer
Pan and zoom across the real night sky using professional survey imagery — stars, galaxies and nebulae as the surveys actually recorded them, not an artist’s rendering. It is the closest thing here to simply looking up, except you can keep zooming.
Where NASA’s Own Tools Win
There is no sense pretending otherwise: for several of these questions the agency page is the answer, and it is free too.
NASA Eyes is a suite of 3D visualisations that run in a plain browser tab and let you fly the solar system, ride along with real missions and scrub time forwards and backwards. Nothing we could build would beat it, and it is the best first stop for anyone who has never touched live space data.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive is the authoritative catalogue of confirmed planets — the source of the 6,336 above — and it exposes a public query service, so it is as useful to someone writing a script as to someone browsing.
For raw material, the Open Data Portal and NASA’s APIs are the front door. The APIs ship a working demo key, so you can paste a request straight into your address bar and watch Mars rover photographs or today’s asteroid list come back as data — no registration, no client library.
Space Weather: The Gap We Do Not Fill
We do not publish a space-weather tool, so this section points entirely away from us. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center is the official US source for solar activity, geomagnetic storm alerts and aurora forecasts, and it publishes a plain-language dashboard alongside the technical products.
The number to learn is the Kp index, a 0-to-9 scale of geomagnetic activity. Above 5 is a minor geomagnetic storm and the point at which aurora starts appearing well outside the polar regions. Pair the three-day forecast with an ordinary cloud forecast and you have a genuinely workable aurora plan — which is more than most paid apps offer.
Closer to home, we do run live trackers for terrestrial events: earthquakes and weather, plus a live snapshot of the planet that counts recent quakes, active weather alerts and upcoming asteroid approaches on one page, each linking out to the raw feed it came from.
Mistakes Worth Skipping
Expecting everything to move in real time
Different feeds refresh on wildly different schedules. An ISS position updates every few seconds because the orbit is predictable; solar imagery arrives on a cadence of minutes to hours. A tool that does not tell you when its data last refreshed is one to treat carefully — ours timestamp what they show.
Opening six trackers at once
The breadth of free space data is genuinely overwhelming, and the usual result of opening everything is closing everything. Start from a question rather than a tool: pick the one page that answers it, get the answer, then move on.
Reading a number without its context
A Kp index of 3 is quiet and 8 is severe, but the figure on its own tells you nothing. NOAA publishes plain-language summaries alongside the technical discussion for exactly this reason. Find the "what does this mean" line before deciding a reading is alarming.
Assuming a close approach means danger
Near-Earth asteroid passes are routine and almost always enormously distant in human terms — a "close" approach is often several times the distance to the Moon. The miss distance column is the one that matters, and it is why our asteroid tracker shows it next to the size rather than burying it.
Hunting for an app
There is nothing to install for any of this. Every tool on this page runs in a browser tab, and most work on a phone. If a site asks you to download something to see where the ISS is, close it.
Common Questions
Do I need an account or an API key to use these tools?
Not for anything on this page. The three LK Forge trackers need no account, no key and no install — they load and start working. NASA’s own portals are the same for browsing: Eyes, the Exoplanet Archive and the Open Data Portal are all free and open. The one place a key helps is NASA’s API service, and even there a working demo key is provided so you can try requests immediately without registering.
How many confirmed exoplanets are there right now?
The NASA Exoplanet Archive listed 6,336 confirmed planets when we checked on 16 August 2026. That number genuinely moves, which is why it is worth checking rather than quoting: you can reproduce it yourself with a single query against the archive’s public TAP service, counting rows in the pscomppars table. We cross-checked it against the separate ps table filtered to default parameters and got the same answer. Be wary of articles quoting a figure with a months-old date attached — the count has climbed by hundreds since the start of the year.
How accurate is browser-based ISS tracking?
Very, for the ISS specifically. The station is in a well-characterised low Earth orbit, its position is published continuously, and propagating it forward a few seconds is a solved problem — which is why a browser can show you where it is without any special hardware. Accuracy degrades slightly after a manoeuvre, such as a debris-avoidance burn or a reboost, until fresh orbital data is published. For visual sighting times from your own location, NASA runs a dedicated service for that.
What is the Kp index and should I care about it?
It is a global measure of geomagnetic activity from 0, meaning quiet, to 9, meaning extreme. Its practical use is aurora: a Kp of 5 or above is classed as a minor geomagnetic storm and generally means aurora may be visible further from the poles than usual. If that is what you are after, NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center is the official source and is the right bookmark — we do not publish a space-weather tool, and pointing you at the agency that does is more useful than pretending otherwise.
Does any of this work on a phone?
Yes. All three LK Forge space tools are built to work on a phone screen and with touch, and NASA’s browser tools are broadly usable on mobile too, though the heavier 3D ones are more comfortable on a larger screen. Nothing here needs an app store.
The space station, the asteroids passing this week, and the real sky in survey imagery — three tabs, no account, nothing to install.
Open the space tools →Want the whole planet at a glance? Planet & Sky Live counts quakes, storms and close approaches on one page.