Hi Home Assistant Community!
I’m thrilled to share my updated custom integration: ISS Spotter!
It lets you track upcoming International Space Station (ISS) sightings directly in Home Assistant.
What’s new?
- Now with latitude, longitude and elevation attributes so you can use the sensor inside of a map card
Originally, this started as a pyscript automation and then a simple integration scraping NASA’s Spot The Station website. But scraping broke — so I rebuilt it to use the Skyfield astronomy library and live orbital data from Celestrak.
This means:
No website scraping — your ISS passes are calculated locally with precise orbital mechanics.
You get the next visible ISS pass based on your exact coordinates, local time zone, darkness, and sunlit conditions.
You still get astronaut data via the Open Notify API.
Key Features
- Upcoming Sightings: Shows the next visible ISS sighting as a
sensorentity. - Rich Attributes: Duration, max elevation, appear/disappear direction, all upcoming passes, plus astronaut count and names.
- Fully Local: Uses TLE data + Skyfield — no more HTML parsing that can break overnight!
- Graceful Fallback: Caches valid data for a short period if the TLE source is temporarily unavailable.
- Flexible Filtering: Set minimum elevation and minimum visible duration.
- UI-Friendly: Works great with Markdown cards, custom button cards, or notification automations.
- Notifications Included: Example
pyscriptand YAML automations help you get alerts before each pass.
Installation
Available as a HACS custom repository or for manual installation.
Full setup instructions and examples are in the README.
This was my first bigger integration project — and a fun way to learn how to build custom Home Assistant components. Hope it helps you enjoy the night sky even more!
Clear skies! 
Cheers,
Harry
Edit: Reflect changes in integration