GUIDES / BASICS
Why there are no ISS passes this week
By Jeroen Wouda · 2 November 2026 · Basics
If you have been checking the pass table and finding nothing, the site is not broken and neither is the station. There are stretches of days or weeks when the International Space Station makes no usable pass over a given latitude, and the reason is geometry that has nothing to do with the weather.
The one rule that decides visibility
A satellite is visible when it is in sunlight and your sky is dark. Both halves of that sentence have to be true at the same moment, from the same place.
The station orbits at roughly 400 km. That is above most of the atmosphere, but not above the Earth's shadow, and on every orbit it spends part of its time in darkness. When that dark stretch coincides with your night, the station is invisible: it is up there, crossing your sky, but unlit. That single fact explains most empty pass tables.
The orbit plane does not follow the seasons
The station's orbital plane is fixed in space, tilted 51.6° to the equator. It does not turn to follow the Sun as the Earth goes round. The consequence is that the angle between the orbit plane and the direction of the Sun changes steadily through the year, running through a full range and back again.
That angle decides almost everything about visibility:
- When the Sun sits high above the plane of the orbit, the station barely dips into the Earth's shadow at all. It stays sunlit right through your night, and on a good night you can see two or three separate passes.
- When the Sun lies close to the plane of the orbit, the station spends a long stretch of every orbit in shadow. Those shadow crossings fall in your evening and early morning — exactly when you would otherwise be looking — and the visible passes dry up.
The angle swings between those two situations over a period of months. So both the all-night seasons and the empty weeks are normal, expected parts of the same cycle, and they alternate.
What a gap actually looks like in a table
Depending on how a table is filtered, an empty result can mean different things:
- No pass rises above the horizon at all.
- Passes occur, but only in daylight, when the sky is far too bright.
- Passes occur at night, but the station is in shadow for all of them.
- Passes occur, but at elevations so low that they are not worth listing.
All four look the same from the outside: nothing in the table, nothing in the sky.
Local reasons a good pass still goes wrong
Even in a generous week, a listed pass can fail for reasons that are yours rather than the orbit's:
- Cloud. The commonest cause by a distance, and the one no table can predict for you.
- A blocked horizon. A pass peaking at 15° needs an unobstructed view in that direction.
- Summer twilight. At high latitudes in June and July the sky never gets dark enough for a faint pass to stand out.
- Latitude. North of 51.6°, the station never passes directly overhead; its arcs are lower and further south, and easier to lose behind buildings.
- Being late. A pass lasts a few minutes, so arriving five minutes after the peak means seeing nothing at all.
It is not a fault, and it is not permanent
The station has not stopped, been deorbited or moved somewhere inconvenient. It completes an orbit every 92 to 93 minutes, about 15.5 times a day, exactly as it has for years, and it will be visible again from your latitude as soon as the Sun-orbit geometry swings back.
That is worth saying plainly, because the alternative explanations people reach for — a broken prediction, a wrong location setting, a site that has stopped updating — are all wrong in the ordinary case. An empty table is usually an honest table.
What to do while you wait
- Check the other station. Tiangong orbits at a different inclination and a different altitude, so its shadow times do not match the ISS's. A week with no ISS passes can still have usable Tiangong passes.
- Try the morning. Visibility seasons often have a morning half that is easy to overlook, at hours most people are not outside.
- Look again next week. The angle between the orbit plane and the Sun keeps moving, and a gap usually closes within weeks rather than months.
- Use the time to learn the table. The numbers are more legible than they look, and reading them well is the difference between catching a pass and missing it.
Where to go next
- See what is flying over you on the ISS pass pages.
- Compare the two stations in ISS versus Tiangong: what actually differs.
- Check Tiangong passes for the weeks when the ISS is quiet.
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.