5/3/2005: Korea at night

[glatt]

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.

[lookout123]

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!

[Trilby]

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

[lookout123]

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

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by glatt

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.

The bottom one in that link is the same image UT posted. In the center between the two is a comparison showing the NK capitol lit up in '96 but not in '01.
If you're right and it is a fake, who's faking it and why?

[tw]

Originally Posted by glatt

Anyway, back to the 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.

Why are there lights in the ocean between Korea and Japan - in the Korea Strait? There is a Japanese island just off Pusan. But not as large as those lights indicate.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by tw

Why are there lights in the ocean between Korea and Japan - in the Korea Strait? There is a Japanese island just off Pusan. But not as large as those lights indicate.

From the site;

It is possible to distinguish four primary types of lights present at the earth's surface: human settlements, fires, gas flares, and fishing boats.

Maybe fishing boats??

[xoxoxoBruce]

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?

[wolf]

Originally Posted by lookout123

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

I thought you were in psychic symbiosis with ZippyT.

[russotto]

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.

[tw]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

From a 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.

That image makes far more sense. Chinese towns are now lit. Whole cities do not appear to exist in the Korea Straits. And the lights more correspond to a poplulation density map of Korea. For example, the shape of lights around S Korea's major population center in Daegu are more in agreement with how that area grew between moutains and along the highways.

N Korea has lights in P'yongynag and in other major cities such a Wonsan (where the USS Pueblo was taken after being captured) and Hungnam. Curiously, N Koreas North East poplulation centers don't seen to consume much electricity for lighting even though this is the region containing most of the nuclear related activities.

[Karenv]

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.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Karenv

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.

No one is claiming "no electricity in North Korea". The point is that N Korea has significantly less electricity. Also questioned is the validity of that earlier picture provided by UT. Was it doctored?

IOW I don't understand your point.

[glatt]

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

[Undertoad]

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."