Starlink Train — Is It Visible Tonight?

After every Starlink launch, a batch of satellites climbs together from a low ~300 km orbit to the ~550 km operational shell. During that raising phase the batch flies as a tight line — the famous Starlink "train" — visible to the naked eye at dawn and dusk. This page detects raising batches live from CelesTrak orbital data and computes exact pass times, directions, and elevations for your location, entirely in your browser.

The train effect is temporary: once the satellites reach altitude and spread into their orbital planes, the line fades below naked-eye brightness. When no batch is raising, the page says so honestly — and lights up again within hours of the next launch.

How a train is detected

No launch-schedule feed is involved: the detection falls out of the orbital elements WatchSat already has. Satellites are grouped by the launch part of their international designator — everything released on one flight shares it — and a group qualifies only if it has at least 8 members, a median perigee below 480 km (still under the operational shell), and, decisively, is still clustered along track: the mean resultant length of the members’ position directions must be at least 0.9, which admits a string spanning roughly a quarter of the orbit and rejects a batch that has phased out around it. That last test is what separates a real train from Starlink’s permanently low shells and from old satellites drifting down — on the bundled snapshot, altitude alone matched about half of all launch groups.

How to watch one

Look in the hour or so after sunset or before sunrise, when the sky where you stand is dark but the satellites 300-odd km up are still in sunlight. A train appears as a line of evenly spaced, steady points following one another along the same path, usually in a west-to-east direction, each taking a few minutes to cross. They do not blink — anything flashing is an aircraft. The newest batches are the tightest and brightest; a batch a few weeks old is already spreading out and fainter. WatchSat computes the pass for a representative member of the batch, so the times you see are for that line as a whole, not for one satellite.

Watch the whole Starlink constellation in 3D · How to tell a train from the ISS · ISS passes tonight

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