Category
Space: 2 Live Cameras
Cameras looking at Earth from outside, and cameras looking out at the stars. For both, what matters is not the forecast but which side of Earth is currently in darkness.
What you can see
Two directions: looking down at Earth from space, and looking up at space from the ground.
The International Space Station camera films the surface from roughly 400 km up while circling the planet every 90 minutes — which means day and night swap every 45. It spends most of that over ocean, so land is the shorter part of the cycle. It is NASA footage and free to use with attribution.
From the ground there is the Ishigakijima Astronomical Observatory's night-sky camera. Ishigaki has some of the least light pollution in Japan, and southern constellations invisible from the main islands clear its horizon. It is one of the few places in the country where the Southern Cross rises.
The station's orbit is tilted 51.6 degrees to the equator, so it never passes over anything beyond 51.6 degrees north or south — not over Scandinavia, not over Alaska. Japan sits inside that band, so there are days when the station goes directly overhead, but the ground track shifts west with every orbit, and the same place almost never appears on two passes in a row. On Ishigaki the question is not whether the Southern Cross is visible but how high it gets: from a latitude of 24 degrees north, the lowest star of the cross clears the horizon by only about two degrees, two finger-widths at arm's length. It shows only where the southern horizon is open sea, which is why the camera is on Ishigaki.
Cameras you can watch now: 2
All 2 are live video. Tap one to open it in the camera list.
Okinawa1
Elsewhere1
When to watch
The Space Station camera does not care what time it is, and when the frame is black the orbit is simply on the night side. Wait and a sunrise arrives. Seen from orbit a sunrise takes tens of seconds, so catching one is largely luck.
The star camera needs a moonless night. For the week either side of a full moon the sky washes out and the faint stars vanish. Aim for the few days around new moon.
On Ishigaki the Southern Cross is up from December to June, and then only for a few hours between midnight and dawn. The rainy season and the typhoon months bring cloud, so in practice March to May, before first light, is the realistic window.
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Agencies publishing the cameras on this page
- NASA (U.S. government work) — Official site
- National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ terms for reuse) — Official site
The footage belongs to each agency. This site is an unofficial guide, and each sample frame was copied once per camera under that agency's terms of use.