GUIDES / BASICS
Tiangong: how to see China's space station
By Jeroen Wouda · 2 November 2026 · Basics
There are two crewed space stations in orbit. One gets the headlines and the live streams. The other is smaller, newer, flies lower, and passes over a different part of the world. If you live in southern Europe, the southern United States, North Africa, the Middle East, southern Asia or Australia, Tiangong is a regular and genuinely satisfying sight.
It is also easy to overlook, because its passes do not coincide with the ISS and its orbit keeps it out of northern skies entirely.
What Tiangong is
Tiangong, which translates as heavenly palace, is China's modular space station. Its core module went up in 2021, and two laboratory modules were added afterwards, giving the finished complex a T shape. It is crewed continuously, with crews rotating roughly every six months, and it is resupplied by cargo craft in the same way the ISS is.
It is a much smaller station than the ISS. The whole complex is generally described as being in the region of 70 to 100 tonnes depending on what is docked at the time, against several hundred tonnes for the ISS. That mass difference is the main reason Tiangong is dimmer.
Lower, faster, and further south
Tiangong orbits at roughly 340 to 450 kilometres, comparable to the ISS and sometimes a little lower. Its orbital period is around 90 minutes, slightly shorter than the station's 92 to 93, which follows from the lower altitude.
The important number is the inclination: about 41.5 degrees. The ISS is at 51.6 degrees, which lets it reach northern Europe and most of Canada. Tiangong's ground track stops at 41.5 degrees north and south, and that has direct consequences.
If you are north of about 41.5 degrees, Tiangong never passes overhead. From London, Amsterdam, Berlin or Warsaw it stays low in the southern sky at best, and often does not clear the horizon at all by a useful margin. From Rome, at 41.9 degrees north, it is right at the edge. From Madrid, Athens, Naples or Istanbul it can pass high overhead. The same applies in the south: New Zealand and southern Australia are inside the band, Tasmania is on the boundary.
When to look
Tiangong obeys exactly the same rules as the ISS. It is visible only when it is above your horizon, in sunlight, and your sky is dark. That means the same two windows: shortly after sunset and shortly before sunrise, in seasons that come and go over a cycle of weeks.
Its lower altitude shortens the window slightly. A satellite at 340 kilometres drops into the Earth's shadow a little sooner after sunset than one at 420, so the good part of the evening is marginally shorter and the last passes of twilight fade earlier.
The practical approach is the same as for the ISS: find the passes with a high maximum elevation, in the hour or so after sunset, and ignore anything in the middle of the night unless the season is one where the station stays lit all orbit.
Telling it apart from the space station
If both are up on the same evening, the difference is usually obvious once you know what to look for. Tiangong is dimmer, often by a full magnitude or more, and it looks like a steady point of light rather than the hard, brilliant spark of the ISS. Against a dark sky away from streetlights it is still easy to see. From a lit city street it can be marginal.
The path is the better clue. Tiangong's lower inclination means that from mid-northern latitudes it stays further south, arcs lower, and rises and sets in a narrower band of the sky. The ISS regularly climbs high towards the zenith; Tiangong clips across the southern sky.
Timing settles it. The two stations are in unrelated orbits, so a Tiangong pass and an ISS pass at the same minute would be a coincidence. If your listing says one object and you see two, one of them is something else: a Starlink satellite, a rocket body, or a spent upper stage.
What you will actually see
At its best, Tiangong looks like a bright star that is moving. It holds a dead straight line, takes four or five minutes to cross the sky, brightens towards the middle of the pass and dims again as it goes. There is no flashing, no colour, no sound.
Binoculars will not show you structure. At 400 kilometres the station is a few tens of metres across, and resolving the T shape requires a telescope, a steady mount and a well-timed pass near the zenith. What binoculars do help with is finding a faint pass in a bright sky, where the extra light grasp makes the difference between seeing it and not.
The most rewarding thing about watching Tiangong is not the object itself. It is the fact that there are people inside it, and that a second station exists at all. Until Tiangong, there had never been two crewed stations in orbit at the same time.
Tracking it from your city
Prediction works the same way as for the ISS: take recent orbital data, project the ground track forward, work out when the track comes within range of your position and when the station is sunlit at that moment. The results are good for days ahead and approximate for weeks.
Our Tiangong pages run that calculation per city, and the guide section covers the observing basics that apply to both stations.
Where to go next
- Tiangong passes lists the next passes for your city, with times and elevations.
- Why passes cluster at dusk and dawn explains the sunlight geometry that shapes every one of those passes.
- ISS passes for the larger station, which follows a different schedule entirely.
More guides
- Best time of year to watch the ISS — There is no single best month. The good weeks depend on the angle between the orbit and the Sun, and here is how that cycle works.
- How often does the ISS pass over my city? — The station circles Earth 15 times a day, yet you can go weeks without a visible pass. Here is why the schedule behaves that way.
- How to photograph the ISS — A moving point of light, a dark sky and a camera, and what it takes to turn a pass into a photograph worth keeping.