The current ISS occupants are NASA astronauts Megan McArthur, Mark Vande Hei, Kimbrough, Hopkins, Walker and Glover; JAXA's Noguchi and Akihiko Hoshide; the European Space Agency's Thomas Pesquet; and cosmonauts Oleg Novitskiy and Pyotr Dubrov.
What time will the ISS appear tonight? The ISS will appear above the UK at roughly 9.49pm BST, according to Nasa's ISS-tracker. Look out for a bright star-like object in the sky moving fairly quickly from the west. You will have to be quick as Nasa's tracker suggests it will only be visible for less than one minute.
According to Spot The Station, the International Space Station will be visible on Friday July 23 at 10:04pm, for approximately seven minutes, from London. It will also be visible at 11:41pm for four minutes. The International Space Station will be seen as a bright white dot moving across the sky.
From most locations on Earth, assuming you have clear night skies, you can see ISS for yourself. It looks like a bright star moving quickly from horizon to horizon to us on Earth. As suddenly as it appears, it disappears.
The best time to observe the ISS is when it is nighttime at your location, and the Space Station is sunlit. Often, such a viewing situation occurs in the morning before sunrise, or in the evening after sunset.
To find out whether the ISS is visible from where you live visit and fill in the name of your town. If it is visible the site will give you a star map showing where the ISS is, its path over the sky and the exact time when it can be seen.
Sometimes the ISS can appear slightly early, so you don't want to miss it. * If you have binoculars, take a look at the ISS through them. You won't see its solar panels, or modules, but its brightness and colours will be greatly enhanced.
Similarly, the ISS does not have exterior lights for us to see, but it does reflect sunlight. At its brightest, ISS is even brighter than Venus - brighter than anything in the sky except the sun and moon.
Viewing is best away from city lights and in cloud-free skies. The satellite will look like a star steadily moving across the sky for a few minutes. Eventually the satellite will fly into the Earth's shadow and then will suddenly disappear from view. The International Space Station (ISS) can be very bright.
The speed a satellite must travel to stay in orbit is about 17,500 mph (28,200 km/h) at an altitude of 150 miles (242 kilometers.) However, in order to maintain an orbit that is 22,223 miles (35,786 kilometers) above Earth, a satellite orbits at a speed of about 7,000 mph (11,300 km/h).
While some may think it may be too small to see without a telescope, it is one of the easiest objects to find in the night sky with the unaided eye. Although the ISS is always orbiting the Earth, it is not always visible to the unaided eye and requires a small amount of planning, and cloud-free weather, to spot.
In spite of the relatively close proximity of Mars to the Earth, its two moons: Phobos and Deimos are difficult to see without a very large telescope. Even though it's roughly the same size as Europa, it's distance from Earth makes it virtually invisible even with professional scopes.
Space Station is only visible when it's illuminated by sunlight. During the day, the sky is too bright to see it and as we look up late at night, ISS flies through Earth's shadow so there's no sunlight falling on the station for us to see it.
However. Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov spent 437 days on the Mir space station from 1994 and 1995 still holds the record for the longest time a person has stayed in space.
The space station looks like a fast-moving plane in the sky, but it will be seen as a steady – not blinking – white pinpoint of light. Typically it will be the brightest object in the night sky (except for the Moon).
Hubble is best seen from areas of the Earth that are between the latitudes of 28.5 degrees north and 28.5 degrees south. This is because Hubble's orbit is inclined to the equator at 28.5 degrees. So northern parts of Australia have great access to seeing the HST and can catch the telescope flying right overhead.
