The International Space Station will be a special treat for all of us in Southern California over the next several days. We will have some truly spectacular “fly-overs” where the station will be perfectly aligned with the sun for some of the brightest passes theoretically possible.
For those of you who may be new to viewing it the ISS will be visible as one of the brightest (mostly the brightest) star-like object in the sky as it passes approx 200 miles overhead at over 17000 mph. The table below gives a lot of information about each visible pass including when and where to look. The lower the Mag number the brighter the ISS will be. So for example the pass on Monday 2 Jan at 6:17pm is the brightest one in the list at -3.4.
Click on the date for each pass for further detail.
| Date | Mag | Starts | Max. altitude | Ends | ||||||
| Time | Alt. | Az. | Time | Alt. | Az. | Time | Alt. | Az. | ||
| 2 Jan | -3.4 | 18:17:27 | 10 | NW | 18:20:38 | 58 | NE | 18:20:51 | 56 | ENE |
| 3 Jan | -2.2 | 17:21:07 | 10 | NNW | 17:23:55 | 26 | NE | 17:26:40 | 10 | E |
| 3 Jan | -1.0 | 18:57:25 | 10 | WNW | 19:00:00 | 22 | SW | 19:00:24 | 22 | SW |
| 4 Jan | -2.7 | 18:00:18 | 10 | NW | 18:03:28 | 57 | SW | 18:06:36 | 10 | SSE |
| 5 Jan | -3.2 | 17:03:37 | 10 | NW | 17:06:49 | 53 | NE | 17:09:57 | 10 | ESE |
| 5 Jan | 0.4 | 18:42:17 | 10 | WSW | 18:42:35 | 10 | SW | 18:42:53 | 10 | SW |
| 6 Jan | -0.7 | 17:43:24 | 10 | WNW | 17:46:06 | 24 | SW | 17:48:45 | 10 | S |
| 8 Jan | 0.9 | 17:27:28 | 10 | WSW | 17:28:31 | 11 | SW | 17:29:32 | 10 | SW |
| 11 Jan | 0.0 | 06:30:38 | 10 | S | 06:32:58 | 18 | SE | 06:35:18 | 10 | E |
All of the predictions above provided by Heavens-Above.com where you can get your own predictions for this and many other neat things to see in the sky above you.