Earth is our starbase — live from orbit.
Starbase Earth is a live astronomy dashboard. Everything on this page is pulled from public, free data the moment you load it — nothing here is a recording, a simulation, or a stock image. The point is simple: Earth is the only starbase we have ever launched from, and you can watch it work in real time.
The globe is a real photographic Earth, not an illustration. Daylight uses NASA's Blue Marble imagery; the night side uses Black Marble, a composite of night-time city lights assembled from the Suomi NPP satellite. The two are blended along the solar terminator — the moving line that separates day from night — using the Sun's actual position at this instant, so the lit half of the globe you see matches the lit half of the real planet. Drag to spin it, scroll to zoom, and switch between a free-orbit camera and an ISS point of view.
The International Space Station orbits at roughly 400–420 km and travels about 27,600 km/h — fast enough to circle the planet once every 90 minutes, which means the crew sees sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets every day. The marker on the globe is its live position, refreshed every five seconds, with a trailing ground track showing where it has just been. The Sunlight readout tells you whether the station is currently in daylight or passing through Earth's shadow — which is what determines whether it is visible from the ground as a bright, fast-moving star.
The planetary K-index (Kp) is a 0–9 scale describing how disturbed Earth's magnetic field is, published by NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. Quiet days sit around 0–2. From Kp 5 the disturbance is classed as a geomagnetic storm (G1), rising to G4–G5 at Kp 8–9. The higher the number, the further from the poles the aurora reaches — which is why this page pairs the Kp value with the approximate geomagnetic latitude where aurora may be overhead tonight.
The moon phase is calculated in your browser from the synodic month of 29.53 days, so it needs no network call and works offline. The disc is drawn to match the real illuminated fraction, and the age tells you how far the Moon is through its current cycle.