San Francisco (US)

On the ground within 1000 km

Launch sites — 34 within 1000 km

Ground stations and transmitting sites — 2 within 1000 km

Announced launches (their pads) — 25 within 1000 km

Nuclear detonations — 940 within 1000 km

Distances are great-circle on a sphere of mean radius 6,371 km; bearings are initial true bearings from the city. Each position is the source catalogue's own, read back from the registry.

What can pass overhead

Of the 23,251 artificial objects the registry places in Earth orbit on 2026-10-18, 20,013 fly orbits whose ground track reaches 37.775° N, so they can pass directly overhead; the other 3,238 never reach this latitude.

Computed: an orbit's equatorial inclination bounds the latitudes its track reaches (inclination i, or 180° − i when retrograde), from the orbital elements the registry holds. «Can pass overhead» is geometry, not a schedule — when, and whether it is lit and visible, depends on the hour.

The geostationary belt from here

The geostationary belt arcs across the southern sky and stands 46.2° above the horizon due south — the elevation to aim at for a satellite at this city's own longitude. Computed: spherical Earth (equatorial radius 6,378.137 km), circular orbit of one sidereal day (42,164 km); good to a few tenths of a degree.

What this page does not know

• Tonight's sky and pass times. They depend on the hour, so a static page would print a stale number. Open the live scene in a browser: /sim.html#sel=EARTH&tn=1, then stand at San Francisco in Stargazing — it computes which satellites are visible now, from this registry, in your browser.
• Anything not catalogued. A site absent from the source catalogues is absent here; an empty list means «not in the registry», not «nothing there».
• Precision beyond the sources. Positions carry the precision their catalogue published.