5/3/2005: Korea at night

Always fun are the "earth at night" images but whenever I see then, I always look at North and South Korea and how vastly different they appear. This is the first such image that I've seen that isolates the entire peninsula.

I had thought the north was just poor -- and they are, eating grass if they can to avoid starving -- but it turns out that this is also the result of a personality cult demanding that all lights be off and all people in the country asleep by curfew time. Because the entire country is a slave state.

Oh. That's much better.

Christpher Hitchens puts it together in this piece on North Korea, which is where the image link came from:

I don't doubt that North Korea has fewer lights than South Korea, but this image looks totally fake to me. North Korea is darker here than the ocean off the coast of North Korea.

N. Korea looks slightly brighter in this version, but really not much. They can't all be fake.

Good. In your picture you can see the lights of North Korean capital city.

No lights in China along the NK border?

glatt, this is the second time I've seen an image like this. (And jinx's makes a third.) Nothing fake about it. I suspect the reason the ocean looks brighter is because water is far more reflective than land, so some moonlight and starlight will be captured.

I had a feeling one of them was on the cellar. Take a look at this one:
http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=419.

It's not quite as clear here because Japan and S. Korea are so bright that they blend together. Just look west of Japan to S. Korea, then look directly north to see N. Korea.

Wow, tw, I had no idea that North Korea was so misunderstood.

I'm trying to decide what not having a year on the otherwise precise date&timestamp means.

Anyway, back to the image. There is a diagonal line that appears between two areas of differing levels of brightness. This is an "artifact" of the camera or the image processing and does not show lights that exist on the ground. If this type of artifact exists in the image, there could be others that make the North seem darker than it really is. (See my diagonal yellow line below, and compare it to the original image.)

I'm not saying North Korea has as many lights as the South. I know it's a backwards-ass country with little electricity. I just think the image looks fake. It looks more fake compared to the other two images posted, which do show the capital city.

There is a hint of light on the coast near the south by the arrow I drew.

Here's an image of North Korea at night that does not appear fake to me (top one.) It shows a few city lights, it shows a brightly lit DMZ, it shows lights in surrounding countries that appear to be dark in today's IOD above. This is was I expected North Korea to look like.

OK, I'll stop ranting and raving now.

dammit people! i told you them n'rth k'reans had lights! we got to invade now. it's time to kill evry las' one o' them sonzabitches!

Lookout, um...er...what are you doing today? You sound a little different.

oh, that was just my best reactionary, redneck,rascist, militia imitation. you don't like?

From a link off glatt's link. I downloaded the 39.6MB tif, converted to a 4.54MB jpeg that's 227.556 inches x 113.778 inches.
Did a surgical strike on Korea for this image.

They look like islands offshore in this image?

The diagonal line is probably a seam between images from successive passes.

It looks to me like this image deliberately excludes everything outside of S. Korea, though. China should be lit, and Pyongyang as well.

You know, the time of night could make the difference. If it were 7 or 8 pm there would likely be more lights. If it were past midnight in a country with severe energy shortages and no night life, then, there may be too few to show up on a satellite. No light color doesn't mean no electricity, it could be very dim or unconcentrated electricity.

You know, maybe it was just cloudy over North Korea and parts of China that night.

Careful Google research finds another two shots:

http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/korea/klights.html

And most importantly

http://agora.ex.nii.ac.jp/~kitamoto/...lights.html.en

"Several images in the following illustrate several regions in Japan generated from the World Stable Lights dataset. The brighter the area is, the brighter the yellow color is, and the background of those images are generated from the Blue Marble dataset."

"IOW I don't understand your point."

The difference between the original picture submitted by UT and the pics with some light could be due to time of day and just having dim lighting. Why assume that it is doctored when there are simpler explanations?

Good show, UT. That one shows the islands between SK and the Japs and explains those lights.

The lights in the water are boats.

Here's another image and an explanation of the lights in the water.

I'm not a fisherman, so I don't know.

Perhaps the light in these images is a measure of light and not electricity. Perhaps much of the light from these fishing boats is being reflected up into the sky, and that isn't happening as much on the land, where dark colored pavement, dirt and vegetation absorbs much of the light from street lights.

When you shine a light from a high angle into the water, some penetrates the water, and some bounces off the surface like a mirror. Perhaps these fishing boats are, in effect, aiming their lights down into the ocean at the same time they are aiming them up into the lenses of the cameras in the satellites.

Perhaps a high-contrast light, versus the blackness of sea, seems brighter on the image.

I would imagine the floodlights from the boats would be at a low angle, trying to light up as much surface area as they can. Lighting the surface of the water would show up in the pictures better than the equivalent city wattage that would only show incidental light escaping from where it's used.

This gave me a flashback of the search lights on trucks that use to mark supermarket openings and new car years at the dealers. They were gas powered and looking into the unit at a low angle it didn't look like those rows of little flames could produce that powerful beam that flashed the Batsign on the clouds.

I have spent probably too much of my time looking at satellite imagery from nasa. One thing that is certain is that the same location can look very different depending on a huge number of variables. This image did look a bit extreme based on other images I have seen. I took this one in to Photoshop and started playing with levels and correction. Here are some results.

<img src="http://home.cwru.edu/~tje2/korea-lights-analysis1.jpg">

I noticed there was a definite difference in the ocean brightness from left to right. pumping up the brightness and contrast brings this out more in the second image. The last image is 'corrected' by myself, eyeballing a line and trying to get the water to the same, consistent brightness. Pyongyang seems to show up much better and this image fits in more with others I have seen. Up in China, however, I think the lighting patterns are not so much cities as they are mountains or geographic features reflecting some sunlight.

<img src="http://home.cwru.edu/~tje2/obvious.jpg">

In the image above, I used the uncorrected version and only played with levels of brightness and contrast in order to really bring out the left-right differences in the image. It plainly shows that the image is not consistent from left to right, regardless of land mass or city lights.

<img src="http://home.cwru.edu/~tje2/contrasty.jpg">

This last image is a left-right corrected version in which I tried to get the lights to show up in a manner used in the other composites people are posting. It still is a bit inconsistent, and very grainy. It is closer to the other images, but quite frankly the image quality is too low and the overall calibration is too inconsistent to really make inferences about North Korea's light levels vs. levels in other parts of the image.

The popular Visible Earth composites are made from thousands of different images laced together. Average brightness for different areas are plotted from multiple observations. A single image is bound to contain inconsistencies, and should not be used directly without context. I'm sure the person who saw this and emailed it around just saw something that helped reinforce a preconceived notion about Korea's situation. Careful analysis shows that while there is a major difference, this image seems to exaggerate the light discrepancy.


There are other factors we haven't even touched - does North Korea use mostly sodium, metal halide, halogen, incandescent, or florescent lighting? At what wavelength is the picture taken? What time was it taken? Were there clouds? Snow? Dust storms? Was this a holiday in North or South Korea? Friday night football games? Tax day? Certainly, some of these are ridiculous questions, but taking a small number of pictures and making broad inferences is always dangerous. You ALWAYS will see things that seem to reinforce preconceived notions. Just ask Colin Powell.

Excellent post. Thanks for your perspective, and welcome to the Cellar.

Hola spanish guy.

Hi ya'll. A little info about the new guy: Just moved back to PA from Houston, TX. I'm not at all spanish or hispanic (fraternity nickname, long and boring story). I have 5 fingers (thumb inclusive) on my right hand. Many years ago, I was born, and I even have a certificate to prove it. I am not at all sarcastic.

BTW, the fact that the other images are composites is why fishing boats and other moving lights will not show up. The composites are designed to show 'permanent' lights, although degree of permanence is not really explained. Some of teh boats could actually be the islands themselves - don't think the blue coastlines are drawn perfect. South Korea's east coast buildup is probably not several miles inland, despite what the blue line shows. These pictures are often taken at odd oblique angles, and they don't always point north. Matching up a coastline drawing to a photograph is often difficult, and not always accurate. Islands usually don't quite line up - just use the blue lines for a general reference.

I still think much of the light in the Korea Strait is fishing boats, but the islands are not lined up very well.

Try here for more sat pics

http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/satellite.html

You get to choose which satellite you look from (no, no Keyhole sats) and the lat and long you look at.

Having never been to Japan I have to wonder if they ever turn any of their lights off at night? Seems to be the brightest spot on the planet!

All we are in the end are talking heads and Monday morning quarterbacks.

I suspect if North Korea is that short of electricity they probably aren't wasting much. Little outdoor lighting, small bulbs in the center of the room away from windows, rooms not in use unlit and a host of other conservation measures that would explain why not much can be seen from space.
Hell, they may even have blackout blankets on the windows.