🛰️ ISS Live Position Scraper

🚀 Track the International Space Station in real time. Pull live latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity, footprint, and visibility for NORAD 25544 in one call, or stream multiple snapshots for orbit-path mapping. No API key, no registration, no manual JSON wrangling.

The ISS Live Position Scraper queries the where-the-ISS-at live position feed and returns 14 structured fields per snapshot, including the satellite's instantaneous geodetic coordinates, altitude above the WGS-84 ellipsoid, ground velocity, footprint diameter, and a day/night visibility flag derived from the current solar geometry. The underlying source has tracked the ISS continuously since 2014 and is the most widely cited public position feed for the station.

The output covers every orbit, every continent, every day-night transition, and works for any moment from "now" forward in time. Snapshot once for a quick "where is it?" lookup, or stream up to 1,000 snapshots per run to draw a flight path. This Actor delivers the data as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in seconds.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Space-education platforms, ISS-tracker apps, astronomy clubs, science museums, STEM teachers, hobbyist developers	Live position dashboards, pass-prediction inputs, classroom demos, orbit-path mapping, sky-watch alerts, museum exhibits

📋 What the ISS Live Position Scraper does

Three workflows in a single run:

• 📍 Single-point snapshot. One live reading, perfect for a "where is the ISS right now?" widget.
• 🌐 Multi-snapshot stream. Up to 1,000 sequential readings with a configurable delay, for plotting a path on a map.
• 📐 Unit switch. Choose kilometers/km/h or miles/mph for altitude, velocity, and footprint.

Each snapshot includes the NORAD ID, satellite name, exact UTC timestamp, latitude, longitude, altitude, velocity, visibility (daylight / eclipsed), ground-footprint diameter, Julian day number, solar sub-point coordinates, and the unit system in use.

💡 Why it matters: accurate live position data underpins every ISS tracker, pass-prediction widget, classroom dashboard, and amateur radio sked. Polling the source yourself means rate-limit handling, JSON parsing, and unit conversion. This Actor handles all of it and emits clean rows.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: altitude, daynum, footprint, latitude, longitude, name, satelliteId, scrapedAt, solarLatitude, solarLongitude, timestampUtc, units, velocity, visibility. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the ISS Live Position Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Leave defaults for one live snapshot, or set snapshotsPerSatellite higher for an orbit trail.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 2-4 minutes. No coding required.

🔗 Recommended Actors

• 🛬 OpenSky Flights Scraper - Real-time aircraft positions worldwide
• ✈️ OurAirports Scraper - Global airport directory
• 🌦️ NOAA Weather Scraper - U.S. weather forecasts and observations
• 🌅 Sunrise & Sunset Times Scraper - Solar event times worldwide
• 🗺️ Nominatim OSM Scraper - Geocode addresses via OpenStreetMap

💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by NASA, Roscosmos, the ISS partner agencies, or any third-party position feed. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available open position data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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