Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Altis
Beautiful, real-time satellite tracking
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 1 we have checked on their own sites, 1 of them free or with a free tier.
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This is a little hobby project that I hope you enjoy. You can see where the International Space Station is now, with live HD video from NASA, on a realistic 3D globe. The positions of the sun and moon are also accurate, though distances aren't to scale. The clouds are also near-realtime; I span that out into a separate project at https://clouds.matteason.co.uk, where the cloud images I create from EUMETSAT data are freely available. I've got more features almost ready to go, like the ability to turn off all UI, toggleable clouds and turning off the day/night cycle I'd love for…
2024 · iss.matteason.co.uk · its alternatives →
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22d ago · space.bl2.net · its alternatives →
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Satcat▲363Analyze and track over 25,000 satellites in real-time
2024 · satcat.com · its alternatives →
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Sup HN, So I got tired of bouncing between Flightradar, MarineTraffic, and Twitter every time something kicked off globally, so I wrote a dashboard to aggregate it all locally. It’s called Shadowbroker. I’ll admit I leaned way too hard into the "movie hacker" aesthetic for the UI, but the actual pipeline underneath is real. It pulls commercial/military ADS-B, the AIS WebSocket stream (about 25,000+ ships), N2YO satellite telemetry, and GDELT conflict data into a single MapLibre instance. Getting this to run without melting my browser was the hardest part. I'm running this on a laptop…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Google Translate for engineers working with motion
2017 · google.github.io · its alternatives →
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uphere.spacefree tier▲112Realtime tracking and prediction for thousands of satellites
2019 · uphere.space · its alternatives →
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Terrapattern▲77A visual search tool for satellite imagery
2016 · terrapattern.com · its alternatives →
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Heimdall▲126Hey HN, We built Heimdall (heimdallspace.com) because the existing tools for space situational awareness are genuinely painful to use: clunky interfaces, fragmented data sources, slow rendering. The ones that aren't are locked behind enterprise solutions. We thought the foundation of this should be open and accessible. The goal is a satellite observability platform: one place that gives operators complete, real-time insight into their assets and the orbital environment around them. Today's release is the foundation—aggregating and rendering the full public space catalog (30,000+ objects) in…
Feb 2026 · heimdallspace.com · its alternatives →
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A "virtual satellite" to map Earth in unprecedented detail
2025 · deepmind.google · its alternatives →
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Hey HN! I made Orbit, an iOS app that allows you to see the satellites, planets, and constellations above you in AR, on a 2D map, and on a 3D globe. The app includes more than 15,000 objects tracked by CelesTrack, together with their pass predictions, descriptions, and detailed orbital data. A searchable catalog of all objects is also available, as well as a built-in chatbot designed to answer any space-related questions you might have. This is my first published iOS app, so any feedback is greatly appreciated! App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6772174570
Jul 2026 · nagylukas.github.io · its alternatives →
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This is a service I've built to provide equirectangular cloud maps of the whole Earth, updated every 3 hours, for free. It's based on infrared and visible light data from EUMETSAT, processed to enhance the clouds and try to reduce the impact of surface temperatures on the final image. I built it because it's surprisingly hard to find these kinds of images in a format that's useful to developers and hobbyists. I was building a 3D ISS tracker and wanted to include live clouds but couldn't find anything good, so I got sidetracked, and here we are.
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Load a gorgeous satellite image in every new Chrome tab
2014 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
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himawari.js▲79Real-time images of Earth from the Himawari-8 satellite
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Beautiful satellite imagery every time you open a new tab.
2015 · chromewebstore.google.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →