That's due to Trans-Siberian Railroad being there. (main line)

"Transsibirskaya Zheleznodorozhnaya Magistral, the longest single rail system in Russia, stretching from Moscow 5,778 miles (9,198 km) east to Vladivostok or (beyond Vladivostok) 5,867 miles (9,441 km) to the port station of Nakhodka."

It's been a couple months since he posted that. He might still be gone..

Ha. I was wondering how a new thread got so many posts so quickly. Oh well. Here's to looking at timestamps early in the morning...

Yeah, I just knocked it up to the top to say I got the pic as a poster for xmas. :)

makes a pretty good background
japan looks liek someone hung christmas lights on it

I'd have thought California, or at least bits of it, would be way brighter than they are on the map. Big state, lots of people etc.

NYC has 8 million people but accounts for very little of the light. Most of light around NYC comes from the other 8 Million who are living outside of NYC.

Science has noted that we expend a tremendous amount of lighting which is lost into space. Little has been accomplished or proposes as to eliminate this energy waste. But, like radio transmissions, heat, etc, it makes space research more of a challenge

These photos were taken by the DMSP satellites. It is a redundanct program cited as wasteful by GAO since an entire duplicate program called Tiros also exists. When I was working on (what I believe to have been called) DMSP 8, the program was suppose to have been scrapped. But some quick thinking political types got it revived by slapping the Maritime emergency locator receivers on the DMSP birds.

Like Tiros, the DMSP circles earth to be in the same time in every time zone - 24 orbits per day if I remember. There are two birds. This picture must be a composite of many days since only the sections without cloud cover could be used.

This picture has better detail than my national picture. In mine, no black between NYC and Princeton NJ. My picture shows a solid white mass from Montauck NY (east point of Long Island), and from Hartford CT, all the way down to Wilmington DE.

Undertoad has noted NJ as the most urban state in the nation. When I-287 was built through Parsippany, Morristown, Somerville, and Edison, about 90% of the state population lived within that belt. Still today, the nation's most urban state has large open areas.

Today, population has grown around Philly and the coastal strip. IOW almost every building on that NJ coastal strip has never seen a hurricane nor even a major storm such as the Northeaster of 1965. Not only is that coastal area only recently populated on low land, but noone really knows what would be required to evacuate those heavily populated off-shore sandbars.

The light suggest a population concentration equivalent to the FL concentration that had highways jammed stopped during a hurricane threat.

What an awesome picture of the world ... an enlightened global community, connected by technology.

The picture is especially effective as a desktop background or wallpaper with the CRT monitor backlighting the image. The picture is so crisp on my 21" Hitachi monitor, I can even enjoy the natural light over the Arctic, and the gradient blue of the ocean depths. If you tile the picture, you can set it for different continental views.

P.S. I think Osama left the light on in his cave. :)

This image is also used by MSNBC in the opening for their flash animated slide show:

The Year In Pictures 2001

http://www.msnbc.com/modules/ps/yip_2001/splash.asp

This is just the begining splash for a treasure trove of awesome photos, any of which would be worthy of the IotD.