August 27th, 2015: ISS Nightlight

The nightlight for the International Space Station is the Earth.
We've seen this type of pictures before, but I never tire of them.



There is 20 more of them here.

Cool looking images, but I'd like to know what I'm looking at.

These seem completely computer generated to me. The elevations of the land are very exaggerated, and the colors are all wrong. Plus there is no cloud cover anywhere and the oceans are lit up.

The ones I posted are obvious what your looking at, but the ones at the link are harder to identify. That's the fun of them.

well, the geographical inspirations for the images are mostly figure-out-able, but I agree with glatt that these are not photographs of the earth. There are a couple at the site that are very dark continental landmasses that could be photos of the earth, but these ones with the swimming pool continental shelf and the pointy hills and spiky coastlines and the ridiculously bent horizons... those are the products of someone's computer skills.

One cool thing with the exaggerated land elevation is that I never knew there was a mountain range in Arkansas. I thought everything in "the middle" was flat, but Arkansas has mountains. I mean, I guess I had heard of the Ozarks, but I thought they branched off the Smokey Mountains ore something. And they have the Ouachita Mountains too.

Anyway, 2 years later I just watched the ISS cruise across the sky!

Did you flash it?

No but I did experience a moment of hopefulness about humanity. Does that count for something?

Probably good for your head, just don't let on to your neighbors, they might get the pitchforks and torches out.
I mean who the hell are you to delay Armageddon.

Oh it's coming baby, even my moderate friends are stocking ammo.

If my house caught fire I'd have a moral obligation to wave off the firemen.

Does Antananarivo on Madagascar really have 99.9% of the light?
I agree that many hours can be spent enjoying those pics.