Each cyan dot is a real Starlink satellite above your horizon right now. At any moment roughly 100–200 Starlinks are overhead — though most are too faint to see with the naked eye. They orbit at around 550km altitude, completing a full orbit every 95 minutes.
Starlinks provide internet service by bouncing signals between the satellite above you and a ground station thousands of kilometres away — all in under 20 milliseconds. The constellation is dense enough that at least one satellite is always in line-of-sight from any point on Earth.
WHEN CAN YOU SEE THEM?
Individual Starlinks appear as faint moving dots — around magnitude 5–6, visible to the naked eye on a dark clear night. The best time is during twilight — 30 to 90 minutes after sunset or before sunrise — when the satellites are sunlit but your sky is dark enough to see them. In full darkness they enter Earth’s shadow and disappear.
🚂 WHAT IS A STARLINK TRAIN?
When SpaceX launches a new batch of Starlinks — typically 20–25 satellites at once — they release together and orbit in a tight line for the first few days. This is a Starlink train: a string of evenly-spaced bright dots moving silently across the sky. Most spectacular 24–72 hours after launch, lasting around 5 days before the satellites spread to operational orbits. SpaceX launches roughly every 2–3 weeks, so trains are a periodic treat rather than a nightly occurrence. On the globe above, amber dots connected by a line indicate an active train over your area.