How to See Earth from Space

Every other guide in this cluster ends with a telescope pointed outward. This one is the exception, because you are standing on the subject. The picture at the top of this page is the one that made the point: the crew of Apollo 8 went to photograph the Moon, looked up, and took the photograph that changed how people thought about home.

There are three ways to actually see Earth as a planet, and two of them are free and happen tonight.

Watch the space station go over

The International Space Station is bright, obvious, and passes over most inhabited places several times a week. It looks like a very bright star moving steadily and silently, taking a few minutes to cross the sky. It does not blink, which is how you tell it from an aircraft.

NASA’s free Spot the Station service will tell you when the next visible pass is from your location, which direction it rises, and how high it climbs. Passes shortly after sunset or before sunrise are the visible ones — the station is catching sunlight while you are already in darkness.

You are looking at a structure the size of a football field with people inside it, moving at about five miles a second. No equipment required, and it is the closest most of us will come to seeing humans in space with our own eyes.

If a pass happens to coincide with a spacewalk, our spacewalk guide covers how to follow along.

See Earth’s own shadow

This one almost nobody knows about, and it happens every clear evening.

Just after sunset, turn around and face east, away from the sunset. Low on the horizon you will see a dark blue-gray band rising, with a soft pink glow sitting on top of it. The dark band is the shadow of the Earth cast onto its own atmosphere. The pink band above it — the Belt of Venus — is air still catching reddened sunlight.

Watch for ten minutes and you can see the shadow climb as the planet turns. It is the only time you get to look directly at evidence that you are standing on a sphere rotating into its own darkness, and it costs nothing but turning around.

Watch it live from orbit

NASA streams live video from cameras on the space station. When the station is in daylight you get a continuously moving view of the planet from 250 miles up; when it passes into night you see city lights, lightning storms flickering inside cloud tops, and occasionally aurora from above.

It is the closest thing to the view the Apollo 8 crew described, available on a laptop, and it is oddly hard to stop watching.

The view that changed people

Astronauts describe a consistent reaction to seeing Earth whole: borders vanish, the atmosphere looks alarmingly thin, and the planet reads as fragile rather than vast. It has a name — the overview effect — and it comes up again and again in first-hand accounts.

We collected what people actually say about it in what space feels like, and if you want to know what it would take to see it yourself, the eligibility check is honest about the cost.

Why this counts as a planet guide

Because Earth is the control. Every judgement in the other nine — that Mars is rust-colored, that Uranus is a blue-green dot, that Venus is blindingly bright — is made from here, through this atmosphere, by people standing on this surface.

And it is the third planet, which is the whole reason a bedtime rhyme in our house ends in an argument about the ninth.