Father Christmas Tracker – Live Over Skies Of Wrexham (ISS)

Father Christmas will hopefully be visible in the skies over Wrexham in the early evening, along with an assortment of tracking tools to follow him online.

Assuming the weather clears up and the cloud shifts you ought to be able to see the sleigh at 5:20pm, while looking south west, for around one minute. The sleigh will look almost exactly the same as if you were seeing the International Space Station, a fast moving bright dot of light passing across the sky visible to the naked eye. If the weather does not improve, or you miss it, you can see Father Christmas tomorrow heading home for a rest at 4:29pm in the same way.

There are a couple of services set up to monitor Father Christmas and his sleigh:

• Google have their tracker live here.
• NORAD are giving up tracking nukes this festive period and have their tracker here.

Back in the UK the National Air Traffic Services (NATS) are also tracking, and have said of Father Christmas: “Delivering presents to the millions of children on Santa’s N.I.C.E. List (National Inventory of Child Escapades) in just a few hours is incredibly complex work so the planning has to be meticulous. Working together we take into account the delivery schedule and decreasing weight of the on-board cargo versus the increasing weight of the pilot (millions of cookies and mince pies soon add up).”

The following guidance has been issued to flyers across the UK today and tonight:

A NATS representative went on to say: “This year we were actually able to film some of Santa’s visit to NATS, and while he refused to be interviewed, he has agreed that we can share it with you. We hope you agree it gives an insight into someone who is truly a unique airspace user.”

For those interested there is a live stream from the ISS / Sleigh via the below embedded video. It does drop out on occasion when Father Christmas knocks the antenna after having too much sherry, or changes back to inside the sleigh where his technical team are hard at work: