Cities / China
Lanzhou 兰州
36.06°N, 103.83°E · Asia/Shanghai · all times below are local
At 36.1°N the station can pass close to overhead; this week's highest pass reaches 81° to the west and the sky stays properly dark for 10.2 hours.
orbits & twilight computed 2026-10-29 21:16 UTC FRESH · 49 min ago
The sky is properly dark from 19:46 to 05:58 (10.2 hours); ISS makes its next visible pass at 05:40, reaching 11° to the north-north-east; Mars is the highest planet at 62° to the east, around 06:22; the Moon is 82% lit (Waning gibbous).
Tonight's timelineLanzhou · 18:10 → 07:22
Interactive plan →At 82% illuminated the Moon is the brightest thing in the sky tonight and will wash out fainter targets while it is up. Look for the planets anyway — they cut through moonlight better than almost anything else.
We track three objects bright enough to be worth going outside for: the ISS, China's Tiangong station and the Hubble Space Telescope. Each orbits at roughly 7.5 km/s and comes round every 90–95 minutes, but a pass only counts as visible when the object is sunlit while your sky is dark — which is why they cluster in the two hours after sunset and before sunrise.
Elevation is the angle above your horizon. 10° is easy to spot if you know where to look; 45° is unmistakable — brighter than any star, moving like an aircraft that makes no sound. The last column tells you where to look first and where it will disappear.
Hubble is far fainter than the two stations: treat it as a dark-sky target for people who already know the sky, not a first sighting.
Positions from SGP4 propagation of the current Celestrak TLEs, checked against your coordinates; accuracy a few kilometres, which for “is it over my head” is plenty. A stale TLE drifts by seconds, not by orbits.
Nearby citiesclosest by distance, each recomputed for its own coordinates
All 170 cities →Other cities
Same computation for 170 locations.