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Satellites in Earth's Shadow · twilight, the umbra, and the ISS at its real height

−12 h +12 h —
The satellite▾
…

Where it is, and whether the Sun reaches it

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Reading the picture

The Sun never moves in this picture — it lies out beyond the lit limb, and the Earth turns inside a shadow that stays put. Sunlight fades through the three twilights — civil to −6°, nautical to −12°, astronomical to −18° — so the terminator is a band, not a line.

Behind the Earth the umbra tapers to a point — away, because the Sun is a disc and not a spark. Around it the penumbra widens. At the height of the ISS the umbra is still within half a percent of the Earth's own radius, which is why a low satellite spends up to two fifths of every orbit in the dark.

You can see a satellite only where all three things hold at once: it is above your horizon (inside the footprint ring), the Sun still reaches it (gold track), and your own sky has gone dark. That triple overlap is the green patch on the ground — it is where someone is watching the ISS go over right now.

Orbits propagated with SGP4 (satellite.js) from elements fetched live; Sun from the low-precision almanac formula. Textures: NASA Blue Marble and Earth at Night. Stars to magnitude 5 from the Yale Bright Star Catalogue, precessed to date; constellation figures after the IAU via d3-celestial; nakshatras from Ashwini by the Lahiri ayanamsa. Moon from Meeus's truncated ELP series, checked against JPL Horizons to half an arcminute.
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