NAZAR

Nonchalantly Assembled Zero-Budget Assessment of Chinese Reconnaissance

Kyon ki NAZAR lagni chahiye!

Created by HD Gala
working in the space domain
at the Takshashila Institution

A free, open, browser-only satellite tracker that turns NORAD orbital data into globes, maps, and click-through stories.

▶ Launch the live globe Take the tour

What is this?

NAZAR is a live satellite tracker. It follows close to 16,000 satellites in real time and turns the raw NORAD orbital data into globes, maps and graphs you can actually play with. Everything runs inside your browser — there is no backend, no account, no tracking, and no API key to sign up for.

The acronym hints at the original focus — Chinese spacecraft visibility over India — but the machinery works for every satellite in the catalogue. I have kept adding cool stuff to it; the tour below is the quick version.

The tour

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1 · The Main Page
Does what it says: pick a city in India — or all ten at once — and see satellite visibility from that location, in real time, split into Chinese and non-Chinese. Click any satellite for the ground it covered over the past 30 minutes and where it is heading. A See all satellites pop-up opens a full globe of every above-horizon object at once, and a launch-news ticker scrolls the latest Chinese launches.
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2 · SAT-STATS
Satellites from all over the world, sorted by country of origin — pick India and see how many of our space vehicles are up there right now. It keeps a running, cumulative count in your browser so numbers only grow, and a Previously tracked pop-up lets you search everything ever seen. The graphs below are eye-opening: individual launch sites in the USA and China have launched more rockets than India has satellites in space.
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3 · TLE Repository
The technical corner, inside SAT-STATS: the raw Two-Line Elements of every satellite vehicle tracked, plus a layman's decoder that explains what every character of a TLE means. Fun to try and read one.
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4 · Orbits & Ground Tracks
Search any satellite and watch its ground track drawn on a flat world map — the past 24 h and next 24 h as dotted lines, with a 30-min arrow marking direction and the place-name it is passing over on hover. Flip to Revolution mode and a speed slider (1× up to 5000×) flies the satellite along its orbit, tracing a golden path with a live projected UTC/IST clock. Two little 3-D globes to the side stay in sync: one stays centred on the satellite, the other spins the Earth at its true rate so you see the orbit's real shape — round for LEO, stretched for elliptical HEO — with the dot blinking whenever it slips behind the planet.
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5 · China-Sat-Repo
My attempt at a sort of Wikipedia page: a live, filterable table of every active PRC payload that untangles the names and nomenclature of Chinese satellites (Yaogan vs Gaofen vs Shiyan…) for a layman. It links out to a deeper Compendium of every PRC programme and a Chinese Satellite Series field guide. Meant for exploring.
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6 · Game-of-Cones
Pick a lat/long, define a cone of visibility, and see every satellite inside it — a handy tool for what sits at which angles when you look skyward. Also has the inverse: Sat Cone displays a satellite's look area on the ground, with the sensor angle fully adjustable.
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7 · 3D-Visualiser
An instinctive God's-eye view of the entire catalogue — all ~16,000 satellites, at true altitude, in real time, all at once, colour-coded by orbit class. Hover any dot for its details; click one (or search it by name in the box at the bottom) to spotlight it — the rest dim away and its complete orbit is drawn as a ring. Genuinely the coolest thing to watch here.
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8 · SATs-by-OPs
The God's-eye view, differentiated by operator: pick a Maxar, a Capella, an ICEYE — or all of Starlink, or the whole BeiDou constellation — and watch their fleets live. Hover an operator's name and its satellites pulse on the globe; click the name to open a dossier explaining who they are, what they fly and why it matters.
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9 · Play NAZAR
Saved the quirkiest for last 😄 — early orbit-tracing glitches were too beautiful to delete, so they got a soundtrack. Press ♪ Play NAZAR and the screen goes full-bleed while the globe gyrates to the track's BPM. Entirely not-useful — and the most fun to build.

Under the hood

Quick tips