NASA reveals stunning photos of Earth at night
Newly released photos from NASA’s Earth Observatory group show nighttime views of our planet in unprecedented detail.
These exciting new images come to us courtesy of NASA’s Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite, an orbiting platform with 10 times better light-resolving power than previous night-viewing satellites. According to NASA, “the data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took satellite 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands.”
Black Marble - Americas
This image of North and South America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.
The nighttime view was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight. In this case, auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed to emphasize the city lights.
“Artificial lighting is a excellent remote sensing observable and proxy for human activity,” says Chris Elvidge, who leads the Earth Observation Group at NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center. Social scientists and demographers have used night lights to model the spatial distribution of economic activity, of constructed surfaces, and of populations. Planners and environmental groups have used maps of lights to select sites for astronomical observatories and to monitor human development around parks and wildlife refuges. Electric power companies, emergency managers, and news media turn to night lights to observe blackouts.
Named for satellite meteorology pioneer Verner Suomi, NPP flies over any given point on Earth's surface twice each day at roughly 1:30 a.m. and p.m. The polar-orbiting satellite flies 824 kilometers (512 miles) above the surface, sending its data once per orbit to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and continuously to local direct broadcast users distributed around the world. The mission is managed by NASA with operational support from NOAA and its Joint Polar Satellite System, which manages the satellite's ground system.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Robert Simmon, using Suomi NPP VIIRS data provided courtesy of Chris Elvidge (NOAA National Geophysical Data Center). Suomi NPP is the result of a partnership between NASA, NOAA, and the Department of Defense. Caption by Mike Carlowicz.
Instrument: Suomi NPP - VIIRS
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
Absolutely stunning. There appears to be a significant part of the world in darkness as it is an uninhabitable hostile environment
One hopes that people reading about such a topic will have some degree of intellectualism.
What the heck do you mean “…appears to be in darkness…”?
Are you one of these people who couches every word in politically correct jargon? Of course it is largely dark, we can see it is largely dark.
As for the reason it is dark, consider the following ideas:
If people live there, they either did not have electrical lights, or did not turn them on, at a time when this picture was taken. They also might have just turned them off 5 minutes before the picture was snapped. Who knows?
Whether or not people live there, it is non sequitur to state that the reason nobody lives there is because it is uninhabitable and hostile – how do you know it is either?
The case could be made that if nobody lives there, it is because they are content living somewhere else.
As for your reasoning, you first comment that the picture is stunning (which I concur with), but follow that up with your ridiculously unprovable claims about a hostile and unhabitable environment. Worse, you state categorically that this environment you imagine, is the reason nobody lives there.
You need to consider paradigm views, and think more deeply.
The US is over a trillion dollars in debt and they blatantly waste billions of taxpayer dollars on something so rediculous as NASA.
AGREED WITH YOU 100% AND WASTE $$$$$$$$$
SICK OF GOV’T!
Your manifold ignorance, and that of the poster immediately above you, is so comprehensive, that attempting to fathom it beggars the imagination.
I am no global warming advocate, but it is very useful to governments to be ableto see precisely what the effect of vanishing sea ice is, and to weather forecasters who can use the information to warn people ahead of time of impending natural disasters in the making.
The Neandertals died out as a species about 25,000 years ago, so they could be forgiven if they did not understand our complex world, were they suddenly to rematerialize.
Oh, wait – are you their long lost descendant?
What an absolutely ignorant statement. Take a mere moment and trouble yourself to look into the incredible social and economic benefits of NASA’s worth. Judging from your current attitude you will be certainly surprised…
Yeah, and you and other crying spoiled babies will go nuts if we pull out space programs. How could you survive without your cell phone and GPS?
Touche!
Oh relax, Steve, otherwise the government will have to waste more money paying for your valium!
An interesting point, but unfortunately, one which completely negates the value of what we have learned about earth thanks to space exploration.
How about this 1 simple fact – that it was impossible to make perfectly spherical ball bearings here on earth, until space exploration showed scientists how to do so, from what they learned about zero gravity?
Yes – those same machines that all of us depend upon daily can function better and last longer, thanks to that knowledge. The machines include medical equipment, scientific equipment, vehicles, and even the moving parts in power tools.
Now, how invaluable do you think space exploration is?
The money they spent trying to you to spell was also wasted
THIS is what you’re critical about? Not Obama’s billions of dollars in vacations and playing at taxpayer expense. The murder of American citizens while he sat and watched via video feed. The destruction of businesses – big and small – everywhere. You’re kidding right?
I loved it. The knowledge that can be gained through NASA is endless and invaluable. The beauty is incredible.
DazedandAmazed perhaps needs a job so that he/she doesn’t spend a whole life watching Ellen while sharing endless opinionated crap.
Truly amazing….I’m glad I took a moment out of work to look at these pics.
To Pam & Colleen
Nicely done – a geunine appreciation of beauty – so nice to see somebody just appreciate beauty without having to justify their feelings (((HUG)))
Absolutely amazing. So glad a took the time to look.
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Available pictures are fabulous. keep up the good work.
Perhaps a little over poetic of me as we near the Christmas season, but these pictures remind me of how interrelated the human family is on this fragile planet we call home. Peace to all….
Jackie, I see your comment not only as poetic, but as the most beautiful and appropriate comment made in this column! Clearly, your intellect supercedes the norm!
Some folks are so short sighted, how do I encourage my congressman to spend more on NASA and SPACE. Simply beautiful and emasculating.
How do you find this emasculating?
Its funny how there is absolutely no star in backgroung. NASA and their coverups. beautiful though!!
… and 911 and the moon landing never happened either. If you read the article and think about what you just said for about 2 seconds you’ll realize how stupid you sound. The orbiting satellite is about 800 km from earth, the closest star to earth is our own sun and its about 150,000,000 km, so is it a surprise that there are no stars!!
What an idiot you are concernedcitizen. May you never take up any matter pertaining to me – I think it would be horrendous to have you looking into anything substantial.
Ponder for just a moment, that at 512 miles above the earth, with its lens aimed directly at a sphere measuring 7,926.28 miles in diameter, there is a pretty narrow field of vision, as one looks toward earth. What did you expect to see – something the size of the sun, that close to earth? If it were there, we would not even be alive to see the pictures, as it would have digested earth a long time ago!
Do yourself a favour, and enrol in an Introductory university course in Astronomy. I’ve taken a few other university courses, but not that one yet, and I know more than you do.
Then, you’ll be able to make some informed comments.
Must be nice to be…… Oh So…… Perfect!
At 5:17 p.m. you made reference to “Neandertals”. Enlighten us. What is that?
Hey, I never said I was perfect! As for Neandertals, look it up yourself.
Stop being a little pretentious prick. i see you comment on everyones comment complaining on peoples ingorance. have you ever looked up the difinition for idiot. i think that wat you might be.
Wonderful, once we all get our security chips implanted, (for our protection, of course) I will feel so much securer. I won’t have to go looking for them, they will be able to find me so easily.
They already can.
Well, dazed and amazed, come and get me.. I have 6 security chips implanted. It’ll confuse them, like they confuse the birds with the lights….ha ha ha
and to finish it off, I have one implanted in my lawnmower that my mother in law borrows and one implanted in a mouse that scurries from house to house in the neighbourhood, and one more that is implanted on a leaf on one of my trees in the back yard…ha ha ha
It’s funny how a different perspective changes the meaning of those photos.
Why do we see all those ‘beautiful’ lights down there, especially over the eastern half of North America?? Aren’t all the streetlights, safety lighting, parking lot lighting, etc designed to illuminate the GROUND we walk and drive on? The light from the cities & highways in the photos is light that has not been aimed at the ground, but light that leaves the bulb above the horizontal…..all of this energy has gone into space and not to the ground where it needs to be. (FYI, not much gets reflected off the ground, except by snow)
Literally millions and millions of dollars in energy is thrown out the window by something as simple as poorly designed lighting, commercial lighting left on all night, office towers that leave lights on, sports fields that aim lights poorly, porch lights left on 24/7, and so on…
This also results in making the sky within 100km of a typical city glow orange-yellow(called “light pollution”)and all this misdirected lighting end up disturbing our sleeping patterns, distracting drivers, confusing nocturnal insects & migrating birds to the point of killing them, affecting plant growth, and blotting out the beauty of the night sky (an inspiring and beautiful part of nature that we only get to see when camping far away from civilization).
As pretty as they may seem, those beautiful photos are actually a clear sign of just how wasteful with energy we North Americans really are…..
…and how much money we throw down the drain wasting that energy…
Though I don’t want to embrace technology totally, I do appreciate its convenience. That being said, the reason office buildings remain lit at night, which as you rightly comment – confuses birds – is to save costs, because more wear and tear is exerted upon the light bulbs the more times they are switched on and off.
What a sad commentary on society that the rich corporations mind purchasing extra light bulbs, and that this economic lassitude kills birds.
I wonder how human’s eyes would have developed, if this ‘lighting phenomenon’ had never occurred? Perhaps we would all have better night vision. I do know that we would have avoided the eyestrain associated with computers and flourescent lights, and thus reduced the number of people needing glasses because of it.
Unfortunately, the full ramifications of how we could have done thigns differently and the sum total of how we could have benefitted without it will never be able to be determined.
To those that slag the money that NASA spends, I suggest that you throw away your cell phone, laptop, and even your velcro. All of these things are direct developments from NASA, particulalry from the moon landing years. Thank those days for development in transistors andlater integrated citcuits, programming, satellite communications (your satellite TV and GPS, you doorknob)
Well said!
Too bad they didn’t really go to the moon in the Apollo era..they gone and done so many wunnerful things like sent the challenger up with a leaky o-ring that killed 7 people…after all that technology. They’s great techy’s but lousy doing checks that are imperative to the integrity of actual human beings NOT flying to pieces in space.
Well SAID????? They insidiously bring in technology AND MAKE business and people DEPENDENT ON IT….WITHOUT CHOICE IF YOU WANT TO SURVIVE…HOW DOES THIS MAKE NASA or GOVERNMENT so glorious that we ought to be forever indebted to this type of brainwashing and control? GET THIS, we spend billions and billions of dollars on technology of gadgets, computers, phones GPS to connect with each other all over the world, yet divorce rate is 50 percent or more, war and unrest is prevalent, languagein the written word, as we know it is changing as fast as lightening, SO WE NO LONGER UNDERSTAND IT and WE CANNOT HAVE INTIMATE (and I don’t mean sex) discussions with the people we care about or friends or those less fortunate than ourselves FACE TO FACE. If you ask me, it’s made us ignorant and the powers that be LIKE it that way…Bon appetit
Not too sure why you all think this looks amazing, it looks like a bunch of mold on a perfectly sliced piece of bread. When I look down from that angle and see all the lights, pollution and crap we have scattered everywhere, it looks like a giant cancer is on our beautiful planet that have destroyed. I don’t even want to think of how bad it will look 10 or 20 years from now.
Check out the definition of sociopathy.
As beautiful, as these photos and video are it should wrap one in a blanket of humility. The Western countries are highly visible (exceedingly wealthy) compared to other countries and societies. The density of the darkness also shows to a large degree that there is much uninhabited land in the world. This night vision of the world should help dismiss the idiotic theory and argument that the planet is over populated, it clearly is not. As statistics can be made to say anything a group might want and/or need them to say, picture proof is their Achilles’ heel.
Honestly ppl?
Extrapolate meaning from materials presented before lending to dialogue. Learn the meaning of a word before using it, learn to spell well. Clearly, I am not talking about typos those happen to us all.
@Richard: WTH: “emmaculate?”
@concernedcitizen:
The reason there are no stars in the pictures “Concerned Citizen” (two words) is because the “space camera” is pointing towards the Earth. Also, the illumination we see from the Earth is not the same or sometimes not present from the space station or camera’s point of view.
How come Australia’s Gibson desert is covered in light?
Maybe all the aborigines have their flashlights pointing up.
Incredible!!
I can fully understand some of the above comments pertaining to this being a “waste of money”. But think about it, if you could afford to do this, wouldn’t you want to see Earth from this perspective?
I know I sure as hell would.
@All the people who have nothing but negative comments and attempted to use words and sentences that make NO sense what-so-ever… jealous much? Did someone tinkle in your cornflakes this morning?