Earth at Night: The Black Marble

[SurfD]

Shamelessly stolen from another forum:

Scientists unveiled today an unprecedented new look at our planet at night.

Away from human settlements, light still shines. Wildfires and volcanoes rage. Oil and gas wells burn like candles. Auroras dance across the polar skies. Moonlight and starlight reflect off the water, snow, clouds, and deserts. Even the air and ocean sometimes glow.

A handful of scientists have observed earthly night lights over the past four decades with military satellites and astronaut photography. But in 2012, the view became significantly clearer. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite — launched in October 2011 by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Defense — carries a low-light sensor that can distinguish night lights with six times better spatial resolution and 250 times better resolution of lighting levels (dynamic range) than before. Also, because Suomi NPP is a civilian science satellite, data is available to scientists within minutes to hours of acquisition.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP can observe dim light down to the scale of an isolated highway lamp or fishing boat. It can even detect faint, nocturnal atmospheric light — known as airglow — and observe clouds lit by it. Through the use of its “day-night band,” VIIRS can make the first quantitative measurements of light emissions and reflections, distinguishing the intensity and the sources of night light. The sum of these measurements gives us a global view of the human footprint on the Earth.

[Full Press Release]

http://youtu.be/Q3YYwIsMHzw  For a nice video of the stuff in question (Is it no longer possible to imbed videos in a post so the vid actually shows?)

We've seen composite imagery like this before, but certainly not at this level of detail (acquired over 312 satellite orbits, processing 2.5 terabytes of data).

The full set of images and a complete interactive map are available at: The Black Marble

Edit: Fixed broken links.

[Trippy]

http://youtu.be/Q3YYwIsMHzw  For a nice video of the stuff in question (Is it no longer possible to imbed videos in a post so the vid actually shows?)

My JavaScript YouTube popup window code was written before they came up with their youtu.be shortener domain so it doesn't recognize it and I'm too lazy to fix that (plus all the other new URL variations they allow now). You can fix it yourself by putting the URL in the "classic" format like so:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Q3YYwIsMHzw

[Warneld]

Shamelessly stolen from another forum:

Scientists unveiled today an unprecedented new look at our planet at night.

Away from human settlements, light still shines. Wildfires and volcanoes rage. Oil and gas wells burn like candles. Auroras dance across the polar skies. Moonlight and starlight reflect off the water, snow, clouds, and deserts. Even the air and ocean sometimes glow.

A handful of scientists have observed earthly night lights over the past four decades with military satellites and astronaut photography. But in 2012, the view became significantly clearer. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite — launched in October 2011 by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Department of Defense — carries a low-light sensor that can distinguish night lights with six times better spatial resolution and 250 times better resolution of lighting levels (dynamic range) than before. Also, because Suomi NPP is a civilian science satellite, data is available to scientists within minutes to hours of acquisition.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on Suomi NPP can observe dim led bulb light down to the scale of an isolated highway lamp or fishing boat. It can even detect faint, nocturnal atmospheric light — known as airglow — and observe clouds lit by it. Through the use of its “day-night band,” VIIRS can make the first quantitative measurements of light emissions and reflections, distinguishing the intensity and the sources of night light. The sum of these measurements gives us a global view of the human footprint on the Earth.

[Full Press Release]

http://youtu.be/Q3YYwIsMHzw  For a nice video of the stuff in question (Is it no longer possible to imbed videos in a post so the vid actually shows?)

We've seen composite imagery like this before, but certainly not at this level of detail (acquired over 312 satellite orbits, processing 2.5 terabytes of data).

The full set of images and a complete interactive map are available at: The Black Marble

Edit: Fixed broken links.

These are wonderful pics. I would love to install them as my desktop background