ISS Live Tracker - Stardance

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@KarthikB on ISS Live Tracker · about 1 month ago

ISS Live Tracker 🛰️

A real time web app that tracks the International Space Station’s live position on an interactive map and predicts exactly when and whether it’ll be visible from anywhere on Earth. Click any spot on the map to get the next visible pass for that location, complete with duration and whether you will able to see it.

Built from scratch with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — no frameworks. Features a live updating marker with a real orbital trail, real time day/night shading calculated from the sun’s actual position, and a pass predictor powered by real ISS tracking APIs.

As a beginner, this was my first fully shipped project, including real deployment debugging (HTTPS/mixed-content issues, case-sensitivity bugs between Windows and Linux, and switching APIs mid-project when one proved unreliable in production).

Live demo: https://droid678.github.io/ISS-tracker/
Repo: https://github.com/droid678/ISS-tracker

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@KarthikB on ISS Live Tracker · about 1 month ago

2h 9m 23s logged

Pass Predictor: Done and Shipped 🛰️
Added the second big feature to my ISS Live Tracker: click anywhere on the map, and it tells you when the ISS will next be visible from that exact spot, not just when it passes overhead, but whether it’ll actually be dark enough and sunlit enough to see with your own eyes.
Started by building this with real orbital mechanics using satellite.js, fetching the ISS’s TLE (orbital data) and calculating look angles myself. Got it fully working locally. Then deployment broke almost everything:

My ISS position API was using http://, but GitHub Pages serves over HTTPS. Browsers block that mix silently. Switched to an HTTPS-only API.
The TLE data source (Celestrak) returned a 403 error specifically when called from my live domain, even though it worked fine locally — likely some kind of bot protection treating GitHub Pages differently.

At that point, with the deadline close, I made the call to stop fighting the orbital math myself and switched to a purpose-built free API (Pollux Labs’ ISS Pass API) that does the prediction directly. Simpler, more reliable, and it even factors in visibility (daylight/shadow), which my own calculation didn’t.
Also did a UI pass — added a tagline, a live status badge, grouped the info text into a proper panel, and a favicon.
Live demo: https://droid678.github.io/ISS-tracker/
Repo: https://github.com/droid678/ISS-tracker.git

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@KarthikB on ISS Live Tracker · 2 months ago

2h 1m 38s logged

Started my ISS Live Tracker for Stardance 🛰️
Decided to build a real-time tracker for the International Space Station after realizing I wanted something that felt genuinely mine, not a pre-made project idea.
Built with plain HTML/CSS/JS + Leaflet.js for the map — no frameworks, kept it simple so I could actually understand every line.
What’s working so far:

-Live ISS position fetched from the Open Notify API, updating every few seconds
-A moving marker with a custom satellite icon
-A trail line showing the ISS’s recent path
-Real-time day/night shading on the map, using a library that calculates the sun’s actual position
-A full dark theme dashboard redesign

Funniest bug: my map completely broke and the console said map is not a function, turned out, autocomplete had renamed my L.map(…) calls to LargestContentfulPaint.map(…) without me noticing. Took a while to spot since it looked so plausible at a glance.
Next up: either a pass predictor (so you can tell when the ISS is visible from your location) or expanding into a broader space weather dashboard.