city lights
 

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...s_dmsp_big.jpg

This is off the NASA website. I'm amazed. Look how few lights there are in Russia and Australia...Look how many in western Europe, southern Mexico, Japan, eastern United States.

How do you suppose they took that picture? It's not night everywhere on earth at the same time. I guess they had to take lots of different pictures, and then put them together or something. Anyway, it turned out to look really damn cool.

many publically released nasa photos are mosaics of satellite/probe photos...

that one is a sweet one, and a classic..

A smaller version went into an Image of the Day thread some months ago - I took that large version and scaled it down to 800x600. But I can't find the thread in a quick look. I think jaguar started the thread with another whole-world satellite image.

That would make a great poster. Does anyone know of any companies that convert jpgs to posters?

No, but in this case, it's already been made into a poster!

http://www.weatherexperts.com/catalo...iid=48&start=1

Wow, it shows the true spread of population. I had no idea that the US population so heavily leaned towards the east. I thought you guys were just spread all over the place.
I love the way those "veins" of light spread east over Russia, too. It looks great.


And I think I can see my house.

...And you left the lights on again!

The common stereotype of the US population is either the highly-crowded, siren-filled city or the suburbs with all-identical houses. Neither does the real picture any sort of justice. For example, the most densely-populated US state is New Jersey - and New Jersey is 50% forest. OK, so the 50% that isn't forest is packed with people and pretty much paved over in highways. Still.

...and New Jersey is 50% forest...

...but for how long?

- Pie

Well, the original english settlers sailed across the atlantic and settled on the east coast. So that's where most of the people in America collected over the course of the years, until trains came into being, of course. But hey, maybe the decendants of the original settlers just didn't feel like moving.

BTW - thanks for the poster link. I am going to seriously consider getting that!

Well...if you like the citiy lights composite, consider looking in the other direction. This one's been my Desktop 1 wallpaper for quite some time now. (And the people's Republic of New Jersey does *not* make a good example of the US as a whole) http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ima...linger_big.jpg

ooooo.......purrrttttyyyy

I asked my mom for this poster for christmas and actually got it! Now I have a poster of an image of the day. How cool is that?

Welcome back. I was asking about you just the other day. Where you been?

The other thread was http://www.cellar.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=419

all hail Count Zero.

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.