WhatsAbove

About WhatsAbove

WhatsAbove answers one question: what is above this exact spot, right now? Paste a US address and get a live radar scope of every trackable aircraft and every cataloged satellite overhead — free, no login, nothing stored.

Data sources & credits

  • Live aircraft: adsb.lol — a community-run, open ADS-B network fed by volunteer receivers worldwide. Route data comes from the same project's standing-data service.
  • Satellite orbits: CelesTrak — Dr. T.S. Kelso's catalog of orbital element sets, propagated in your browser with SGP4 (satellite.js). We cache element sets and refresh at most every 2 hours, per CelesTrak's polite-use guidance.
  • City data: GeoNames (CC BY 4.0).
  • Airport data: OurAirports (public domain).
  • Geocoding: US Census Bureau geocoder, with OpenStreetMap Nominatim as fallback (© OpenStreetMap contributors).
  • Sun & pass math: computed client-side — standard solar position algorithm and an Earth-shadow cylinder model.

Coverage honesty

ADS-B tracking is crowdsourced: what you see is what volunteer receivers within radio range can hear. Over most US metro areas that's essentially everything airline-sized; over remote areas, low-altitude aircraft can be missed entirely. Some aircraft are also invisible by choice or policy — FAA privacy programs (LADD/PIA), and most military flights. So an empty scope means a quiet sky or quiet receivers; we say so right on the scope instead of pretending.

Satellite positions are predictions, not live telemetry: published element sets propagated with SGP4. For low-Earth orbit this is accurate to a few kilometers within days of an element set's epoch — plenty for spotting, not for operations. Pass visibility ("Tonight") uses a standard sun-lit-satellite / dark-observer test and a cylindrical shadow model; brightness labels are estimates.

Privacy in both directions

We don't store your address, your location, or anything else — every lookup lives in the URL and your browser. In the other direction: all aircraft and satellite data shown here is already public by design and by regulation. We deliberately do not offer ownership lookups on people or celebrity-jet tracking.

The plumbing (for the curious)

The whole site is a single Cloudflare Worker with zero databases. Aircraft queries are rounded onto a 0.25° grid and edge-cached for 6 seconds, so every visitor watching the same patch of sky shares one upstream request; orbital elements are cached 2 hours at the edge and again in your browser. All propagation runs in a Web Worker on your device — the satellite layer costs no API calls at all.

Something look wrong? The scope is only as good as its sources — check the same spot on another tracker before assuming the sky is broken. Questions and corrections: this project is young and improving weekly.