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Composite Of Earth At Night
crmartin writes "Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is an incredible composite image of Earth from space at night. Actually a composite from many pictures from the Defense Meteorological Satellites Program (DMSP), it's like a skeletal view of the Earth in tiny lights. If you really like it, there are hi-res images up to a 40 megabyte TIFF."
How could you allow a link to a 40MB file into a /. article? Oh the humanity...
interestingly, we clearly see northkorea (black) surrounded by light (southkorea and china)
This is not a new idea, pictures like these have been around for like fifteen years or so. It's fairly simple to generate as soon as you have satellite image data available. I believe I had something like this as my desktop background at around '96.
I have had this as my desktop for over a year now... I suppose its nice to show it to more people, but its hardly newsworthy...
OK, if you were an alien, where would you land? Somehow anywhere in the United States seems to be not a very bright idea. Stupid Roswell aliens...
Why is half of Texas so dim?
Actually, I made a wallpaper out of this once... of just North America anyways.
if you have been a fan of Xearth and the better versions, it is sorta..errr.. 3 years late as far as a scoop.
Oh by the way, did you try www.google.com yet?
It's a pretty new site that just opened.
> Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is an incredible composite image of Eareth from space at night.
Actually it was Saturdays...
At any rate, if you click the link, click the resulting image to get a bigger one, and then resize it, it makes pretty nice wallpaper. Unfortunately the aspect ratio isn't fit for a desktop, so you'll have to trim it or let the aspect ratio change to get the whole thing.
Still makes pretty nice wallpaper, though.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It tells you who is paying their electricity bill and who is not. Africa is awfully dark.
All that light headed skywards when it was intended for the ground. Apart from the waste of valuable resources good old Mr Alien can see us!
For problems, seek only the simplest solution, complexity brings with it more problems.
Had it on my desktop, but noow I would rather have a realtime picture where I can see the light /darkness barier moving.
I can see my house
The most beautiful part of it is still the bright line going through Egypt where the Nile river is.
The lines going through eastern Russia (most likely not Russia anymore, but I'm not up to date with the current *stans there), are they based on roads or railroads?
bash$
Anyone else notice the 2002 date on the image?
By the way, the XPlanet project (xplanet.sf.net) can use images like this for the night-side rendering of a near-realtime Earth on your desktop.
[
Now they'll know where to attack first! Sheesh.
[sig]darkfus[/sig]
If you scroll to the bottom, it even says it was a previous APOD... from 2002.
I can see my case mod from here!
August 11 2002. That's what it says, when you click the image for the larger image (bottom left corner).
Check out
http://www.dfd.dlr.de
The German Remote Sensing Data Center. DFD
These guys process sat data etc. Some cool pics here.
English link at top.
Go to sat data on left, then gallery.
G/
My Paintball Pics
The coolest part, in my opinion, is how the ice/snow of the artic and antartic make this very soft sheen with the strong reflective properties.
Looks like they decided to repeat this imagine on APOD, it was last up Nov 2000. They decided to lighten the image a little, I guess the last one was too dark.
I was able to buy a poster size version from my campus poster sale last year, I'm a big fan.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
You can see a lot of light around the "M8 corridor", about half-way up running east-west, and then light where there are large ports up the east coast and along the south side of the Moray Firth. The black bit in the middle is all mountains and moorland. It looks very, very isolated like that...
Anybody got any idea why the river Nile is lit up like it is?
What's telling is North and South Korea. North is almost 100% dark. See this link for a close up.
Check out the Nile and the coastline of Europe.
Here's what I do: Bitty Browser & Andromeda
Isn't this just a repost of the 2000 pic? The thumbnail is brighter, but the actual image looks about the same.
...it appears that the Earth is flat!
Editor's note: This image has become an email-attachment phenomenon! It has also generated many print requests. Unfortunately, we do not sell prints.
What's stopping NASA from selling prints of images like this? It seems like it would be a good way for the public to show support for our favorite underfunded space program.
The picture explains why its called the Dark Continent.
what kind of projection is this?
It seems to make the world seem very small (exaggerates the UK) but doesn't exaggerate Greenland. The sense of a small world may also be due to focusing only on light areas.
The Peters projection gives an accurate representation of the sizes of countries.
It's quite sobering, actually. You look at the US and Japan and Western Europe blazing away, and then realise there are people elsewhere who have literally *nothing*, not even something as 'simple' as electric light.
You must think in Russian.
This image is actually pretty old. It's been used as a wallpaper in a lower res in many Windows and Linux (KDE) themes too. Ain't nothing new, just that today it became the pic of the day.
NASA must be cursing slashdot right now for posting a link to the hi-res image download page. Surely, it will multiply like a plague in the next few days, not only will us geeks be leetching this photo, but everything else that we find interesting, in high res.
I prefer the Nasa JPL DFRC (Dryden) Planes pics as opposed to the heavens and the earth at DMSP (what's with Nasa's naming scheme?). All those X-Planes and B-2s and SR-71s in Hi Res.
Go leech some of the most beautiful war machines ever created. Sonic Booms photographed..
http://www.dfrc.nasa.gov/Gallery/
At the National Weather Service Lab here in Boulder, CO they have a silmilar map in color. A composite, it shows lights from squid fishing fleets off South America and fires in the Amazon basin from burning off brush to graze even more of those damn cows. Some of California's fires might have been on it, can't remember.
Copies are for sale too. Google for it.
In a similar vein; how come all those Sea areas are pretty dark ?
How does this matter? It's neat, but it's something I'd expect in my inbox from my annoying friends, not on slashdot.
Actually this is gives just a rough idea of what light pollution you might experience. If you want to find out more, you can look at the The World Atlas of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness.
If you are in north america, the Clear Sky Clock gives you an quick way to see what light pollution is like on your clock having extracted sections from the atlas. For instance the Montreal clock clock gives this map for Montreal. Clearly not a great location for astronomy.
But the worst, is to realise that this loss of light results in actual light pollution since much of this electricity has been generated with fossil fuels which produces the CO, NOX, CO2 and eventually SMOG.
It must be how the stars see us at night.
After looking at this map, I'm curious to see that there seems to be a freeway that seems to run all the way from Europe through Moscow to China and Japan. And it looks possible you could drive down the East coast of China to Singapore.
It's also strange to see how the areas of several countries (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, especially North Korea) don't have any lighting even though their neighbours are extremely well lit.
So, who has a .torrent for that 40MB file that has obviously been removed due to the /. effect?
/. article, anyway? :)
And just who thought it would be a good idea to link to a file of that size on a
It looks like the small version of the photo was taken recently, but if you view the "larger" version of it, you get the old 2002 image (note, the 2002 image is much darker).
SPAM solution made easy: 1 spammer, 5 cords of rope, 5 hourses, and fireworks. Be creative.
Light pollution is overlooked by most of the populace, but to us amatuer astronomers it is a royal pain in the ass. I now have to travel 3 hours into the rural sticks to get a glimpse of the Milky Way (I'd have to get on a plane and travel to Africa to enjoy it in its full glory). I'd be willing to bet that half the US population has never even seen the galactic clouds of the Milky Way ... which is a shame because it borders on a religous experience.
Not to sound like Smokey the Bear but please Please do your part in help preventing light pollution and save a little extra in your monthly energy costs in the process. Use motion sensors for your outside security lights and timers for walkway lighting. Blinds and curtains to prevent inside lighting from leaking out into the neighborhood.
You'd be suprised how many backyard astronomers there are!!
More info on the problem:
International Dark Sky Association
Ya, god (or whoever) forbid that I make a wallpaper out of the part of the world that I live in.
I will have my revenge in meta-moderating!
Well, there are two reasons. One is that the McDonald Observatory, and the largest telescope in the continental U.S. is out there, and their Light Pollution Program has successfully reduced stray light for hundreds of miles.
;-)
The other reason is that there just ain't that much stuff out in West Texas.
It looks like .. yes .. I left the back porch light on, again.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Does the USA build its cities in a grid as well as its streets? It kinda looks a bit like that from space :-)
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Run 'emerge -uD'
This image is actually so old (2002/08/11) I have three friends with this as a poster...
Did anyone get a hold of the big file and could mirror it?
... in Japan? ;)
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous...
This DMSP image produced by the Block V spacecraft is nothing new and has been around for a very long time. As far back as 1982 we used this image to create a picture we gave our students who reached honor grad status.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
by the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program called "Low-Light Imaging of the Earth at Night". It can be found at http://dmsp.ngdc.noaa.gov/pres/low_light_120701/in dex.html/.
Carousel is a lie!
It doesn't look THAT accurate.
Take a look at Tsushima (an island off the coast of northern Kyushu, Japan, just south of South Korea). It is almost complete lit up. But Tsushima is mainly mountains, and fairly sparsely populated... There is nothing there that would generate the amount of light that the image suggests....
Any idea why this might be?
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
Damn right. The good guys at APOD *often* do reposts of the picture of the day.
d /apod_search?earth+at+night
Proof:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/apo
I tried to make them add a way to know on the APOD's website when an image is a repost or not, but got no answer. I guess they may want us to believe every day they have a *new* picture, which is actually not the case.
Animoog.org
This picture is perfect aspect ratio for that, I used to use it as mine for quite some time.
I've always considered this image to be a hall of shame. The areas lit up the brightest are the ones that are the most wasteful. There's no reason for even a highly developed region to be lit up like that.
Remember the rule, if you can see the actual light bulb, and you're not standing between the light and what it's supposed to be lighting up, it's a crappy fixture and is just wasting energy. The US alone wastes over a billion dollars a year on energy wasted due to bad lighting fixtures.
Go to a home improvement store sometime and try to find a decent exterior light fixture. You can't, they're all crap. People wouldn't hang a bare bulb in their house and think it was pretty, but for some reason they think it's fine outside. I think it's because it's shining AWAY from them, they don't have to look at it.
You can buy decent fixtures, but not at the big box stores, so most people never realize they're buying junk fixtures.
See the International Dark-Sky Association for more info
40 MB!
It would be interesting to see...
Egyptian's like to live at night. They usually stay up till 2am and often take a nap/rest in the afternoon because of the heat. Note also that Egypt is booming with tourism. It's a great place to visit and the place to be is close to the Nile so if ever you go to Egypt expect to stay up late smoking chicha! ;)
Would be an interesting activity to perform some kind of integration on the light intensity coming from different regions to get a crude estimate of how much energy is used in each region. I know there would be many inaccuracies and that all energy sinks don't emit light, but it would be interesting to see how close you would get to the measured numbers.
You must be from Baltimore. I think Baltimoreans only say "same think" instead of "same thing", don't think they actually write it though.
I get depressed because I cant even get laid in my city, and to think there are so many women in so many cities all around the world. :(
I have, on my wall, an earlier version, from when I was a kid. Comparing the two is actually sort of scary. On the other hand, it's time to update my earth at night graphics in Celestia
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Any idea why this might be?
That isn't actually Tsushima, it's Monster Island. The UN, in cooperation with the Russian government and the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, keeps a constant surveillance vigil on the indigenous monsters such as Godzilla, Mothra, and Gamera. (After 1954, nobody's taking any chances). This necessitates a lot of bright light, which is what you're seeing in the pictures.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
A large selection of imagery with animations and image archives (~48 hours or so) can be had at https://www.nemoc.navy.mil/sat_user.php. Be sure to check out the modis/eos dataset. No password is required for 90% of the site...
Uhhh, because more than half of Texas is basically wilderness / open range land?
This was really interesting the first time I saw it during last summer's blackout of the north east. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out which major cities should be lit up but weren't. With everyone's lights on, it' just not as interesting.
The comment has already been made. Let's move it along people. Nothing to see here.
a few years ago, I read in the news that the mayor of Quebec City wanted to install enough lights, so that it would be possible to see the city from space...
I thought, what a moron. First things first: give us cheap space travel, then worry about being seen from space.
more seriously though, I was hoping that last summer's great blackout would've reminded the urbanites what the nightsky is supposed to look like without light pollution, and would have motivated them to call for more efficient street lighting.
You need to take a look at a globe, my friend.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Does the image filter out water vapor? It cant be so clear all over the world!
...to screw in a lightbulb?
Obviously there arent enough.
It appears that either the 40-meg image has been removed or that it was actually a 4-meg one. Did anyone happen to snag the 40-meg one if it existed? I would love to have that since I enjoy flying at night so much.
townships.
Actually, the organization of the West into townships began with the Land Ordinance of 1785, and first applied to the Northwest Territory, northwest of the Ohio. The same system was applied to the Louisiana Territory when it was later purchased.
It's remarkable to look out the window if you are flying across the Ohio River near Pittsburgh - the farms are laid out in chaotic geometrical shapes from Maine all the way to the Ohio - and then at Steubenville, Ohio, along the river, it becomes an even grid towards the western horizon. That's the point of origin for the entire West.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
I have a jpg-files dated Sep 2001, which look very much same as this. Has anyone found any date information or are we fed with old data ?
What's that off to the right of Madagascar? Dr. Evil's lair? And some of those little spots in the Indian Ocean?
I remember seeing a picture like this ( of the US ) on the wall at NASA Greenbelt in the 1980s. I was struck by it because it looked like maps of precipitation and vegetation ( and bird life ) that I had seen previously. At least in the US night-light follows population which follows water. Note the vertical line at about 100 degrees west longitude where the dividing line is between atmospheric moisture that can flow north from the Gulf of Mexico and those areas to the west that don't get that flow.
Shouldn't we at least be able to see a couple science stations, like McMurdo?
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
the Blue Marble images (this "City Lights" image is from the Blue Marble project) have been up and publicly available from nasa.gov for years. Full res TIFFs (21,600 by 21,600 pixels) available by special request.
The Nasa site seems to be screwy so...
v isibleearth.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/viewrecord?5826
d _lights_16384.tif
The Wayback machine to the rescue!
http://web.archive.org/web/20040203105423/http://
Which gives you the direct link:
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev58/ev5826_lan
There is no spork.
Long time ago on slashdot same story was there. I remember the story talking about North Korea and south korea division on basis of night. Cant find the link though
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
does anyone find it odd the light patterns follow that of a petri dish with bacteria on it? smith was right, eh?
"Why is the north-west region of India darker than the rest?"
Most of Rajasthan is desert.
Another topic: I find it interesting that the entire eastern part of the United States, and all of Europe, are lit.
This isn't news this picture has been around for YEARS
I've been using a nearly identical, albeit older version of this image for my DT for years. It was time for an update... so thanks.
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
"Check out the cool NASA pic"
inviting the response, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth:
"O Evil capitalists of the First World! Indulging in such wasteful light pollution! Bow your heads in shame!"
Left-wing socialist nutbags, if there's one thing you're good for it's pissing on *anyone's* parade, any time, for any reason. You boys are the reason Prozac was invented.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
The picture is used together with a matching daylight one for a Win screensaver called Starsaver available from www.staralliance.com. They show what parts of the earth are in sunlight (using the day photo) and what part is dark. It being the star alliance (one of the largest airline networks) they then show the progress of the various day's flights across the map. You can fastforward a particular day as well.
See my journal, I write things there
Really guys, this is an old one.
M.
hay guys ! look @ that dancing baby ! It looks so cool
http://www.caf.dlr.de/caf/satellitendaten/bilderga lerie/
I'm wondering, what's the dense spot right above Italy? Or maybe in Italy? Milan? I'd guess it's in Switzerland but I'm not sure. Bern? Zurich? Anyone know?
Random is the New Order.
That pics been around for a few years now, glad the /. crowd finally found it....
oh yeah, I can see my house from here.
I like it... heck, I love it, it's beautiful!
/.'d the site last time the story was posted... did we have to go and break it again?
That must be why it's been my wallpaper for almost TWO FRIGGIN YEARS!
Slashdot: News for procrastinating nerds, stuff that mattered a while ago.
Really people... it was bad enough when we
If I knew the wedgies I gave you back in 6th grade would have resulted in this . . . I might have taken a moments pause.
Old image, blah blah blah. What the hell are those lights out in the middle of the ocean? Oil rigs?
Hey, there's Iraq...
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Check out the 38th Parallel, like night and day between the two Koreas: North Korea is night, South Where? Find Japan. It's that blob to the left, attached to Mainland (Red) China. Where the dark/light parts meet is North/South Korea (along the 38th Parallel)
Um. It appears I was hypocaffeinaemic when I wrote this, or it got edited slightly.
/.-ed.
The two links go to separate places, and at least when I wrote the article, the second link led to a page that included very large files, including one that advertised 40MB. I downloaded it but didn't pay attention, and it's on my system at home, so I can't check.
I just tried it, and the second link goes to a blacnk page right now, so I suspect it's getting throttled or otherwise
This is pretty common on slashdot to present old material as new. Many techies haven't studied much history- in general, or their own fields. As George Santayana said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Take a look it is due east from North Carolina and due south from Halifax, NS. (Note, Bermuda is NOT in the carribean. It is in the middle of the gulf stream 700 miles off the eastern seaboard of the US.)
On a different note... I am now living in Osaka Japan. I find it really interesting that in this small, densely populated country places like Tokyo and Osaka (Kyoto, Kobe) are just solid light; but nonetheless there are still areas of complete black.
Last week I climbed Mt. Fuji. (Between Osaka and Tokyo) I was really struck by how bright the stars were. I hadn't realized how much light pollution I had come to see as normal (I was born in rural Canada.) I saw three shooting stars. I have never seen that kind of thing in the city before. And from the peak at 3776 meters the view up was crystal clear. I wish everyone had a chance to experience that kind of night view.
The most incredible display of stars I've seen was from a sailboat in the middle of the North Pacific. The combination of utter darkness, clear skies, and abundant time for reflection made for a deeply moving experience that I'll never forget.
It's probably not a coincidence that I now live about 10 miles from the nearest traffic light, in one of the few dark areas you can see left in the U.S. on that map.
"Don't look at the light"
"I can't help it..."{BZZZT}
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Geographic+Projecti on
Looks to be a simple Geographic Projection, where the lines of latitude and longitude are made into squares. Simplest projection to do, pretty useless for any kind of real mapping. But it looks nice.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Actually it's just Smokey Bear
I got one last year for my high school classroom and it's beautiful.
I can see my house from here!
It would be cool to see an animation of this image over time. You would see the lights growing.
http://www.askthevoid.com
It's now my desktop background image, but also: it shows plenty of nice "empty" space just up the Pacific coast from Vancouver...
MORTAR COMBAT!
That's actually /.'s new, blinding color scheme.
The Aliens weren't trying to check out Roswell, they were homing in on signals they detected that were created by the first atomic explosion in White Sands, and just happened to crash (relatively) near by...
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
Damn, why didn't someone tell me when they were taking these pictures so I could turn my light on?
We lost power last winter around 1100pm one evening. I went outside to survey the damage and, for a brief moment, I could have sworn I was watching a fire lick at the sky- the normally pitch black sky was 'orange' and flickering, just as if a huge fire was a few doors down.
Then it hit me- I was watching the death throes of the power grid as all the street sodium vapour lamps attempted to stay on... and as they cut out the sky was left it's natural, black look.
Oh, and this image is WAY old. I've seen 20x60's for some time around work, I'd say for at least a year.
I can see my house!
I left my lights on!
Raw data: http://dmsp.ngdc.noaa.gov/html/download.html
m /BlueMarb le/
L ights/
s .html
Related true-color global images:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroo
Articles about research being done with the global lights dataset:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/
Info about the city lights data: http://dmsp.ngdc.noaa.gov/html/night_light_poster
Maps have long been used to imagine events occurring on the ground from an airborne perspective. Satellites now record a similar view of actual events for scientists to study. The Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) currently operates four satellites carrying the Operational Linescan System (OLS) in low-altitude polar orbits. Three of these satellites record nighttime data. The DMSP-OLS has a unique capability to detect low levels of visible-near infrared (VNIR) radiance at night. With the OLS "VIS" band data it is possible to detect clouds illuminated by moonlight, plus lights from cities, towns, industrial sites, gas flares, and ephemeral events such as fires and lightning-illuminated clouds. The Nighttime Lights of the World data set is compiled from the October 1994 - March 1995 DMSP nighttime data collected when moonlight was low. Using the OLS thermal infrared band, areas containing clouds were removed and the remaining area used in the time series.
open it up in photoshop and mess with the levels, color balance, and saturation, and you can bring out the natural colors and still see the lights
What?
From looking at this image all I can think is, come on guys, surely we can spare our backwards northern neighbors a little power.
40 MB TIFF my @$$.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
How much would it cost to build an automated telescope with a T3 connection in the middle of Africa?
:)
Have you seen the websites with the 'interactive' webcams where you can click a point on the image and the cam will center on that point, and you can zoom in and out?
What if a telescope was built in one of the best locations, but was fully automated? It doesn't have to be a monster, but the bigger the better of course.
Skygazers from around the world could set up accounts (pay?) with the telescope and "request" shots of certain points. The scope would then point to that coordinate and grab an image for you. Bandwidth allowing all images would be archived for future visitors who are just 'browsing'.
Software could be written to map out the most economic moves required to hit each of the points. (You want to look at Orion's belt? Okay, we'll be in that area Tuesday night...) If there is no que the scope could systematically scan the sky snapping a pic every so often so that there would be a cache of recent images. (You want Orion's belt? Well, I can't do a close up until Tuesday but [HERE] are all the images I've collected in that area over the past month if you don't want to wait.)
Or am I inventing the wheel here?
Anyone notice that this picture looks similar to the Earth on the viewscreen of the Enterprise when the borg took it over in Star Trek First Contact? I for one welcome our new conformist masters.
Why would you find that interesting?
America was colonized from the east to the west. It's only logical that the east would be more lit, while the more sensible are less lit towards the sky.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Converting the 3,268,616 byte TIFF to a PNG and recompressing it with optipng (both lossless steps) brings the file size down to 1,940,833 bytes. I would expect a similar reduction with the 40MB image (if it exists).
Omnes arx vestrum sunt adiuncta nobis.
Actually it's been done: Rent a Scope ... but besides that there is no substitute for actually being there and experiencing a truly dark sky with the naked eye (no telescope needed). The galactic center is so bright it casts a shadow.
Am I the only one that noticed how the entire outline of India shows up so clearly? It's amazing how pronounced that is.... Guess all those outsourced IT jobs require lights at night, too...
It's interesting to see the dense line of lights in inland Pakistan. That's the northern border of the Thar desert if I remember my geography.
Florida appears to be lit up. Wonder what it looked like during the hurricane, or perhaps after the hurricane when so many people had lost their power?
Has any one done a picture of what Earth would look like without all the water? Would be interesting to see all the land masses stand out as tall mountains/plateaus, with huge crevasses spanning the width and breadth of the globe. Would like to see a High Detail version like the night scene picture.
If firefighters fight fire and crime fighters fight crime, what do Freedom fighters fight?
Sorry for the abstract movie reference. You may not get it unless you've seen "Ferris Bueller's Day Off".
Comparing your population density map to the nightlights map, it seems Madagascar is quite under-represented by their light. When I first saw the nightlights map I guessed that there must not be many people living there. But your population map shows otherwise.
Well... in the US' defense, they have broken ground, though getting the light water reactors built and in place has taken an inordinant amount of time.
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
Well, if "Mr. Alien" comes here, you won't be a candidate for "Belgian Waffle", since we humans are so full of chemicals anyway.
But, if the DO want us for food, you can rest in the comfort of being among "Hoomon Sooflay".
OTOH, any aliens arriving (by) here probably probably lost their vestigal stomachs and the need for meat. They'd probably drops sign posts saying: "Nothing here; move on..." in hex, octal, etc. Better yet, they could park a few dozen danger beacons around "our" solar system...
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've spent significant amounts of time and effort campaigning about light pollution to local governments. For the most part, even amateur astronomers (like me) aren't claiming that no light is a good thing. Even astronomers need light to do things at night. What we'd really like, though, is more intelligent lighting.
Most street lights and outdoor residence lights are very lazily installed and don't have adequate fixtures. Very few are actually full cut-off lights, meaning that substantial amounts of the light that they're producing is simply going up into the sky where it's wasted anyway. That part of it is a simple waste of energy, and reducing the waste should benefit everyone.
Besides that though, there's a huge mis-perception that simply flooding an area with more light at night makes it safer. I won't even get into the implications this often has on local wildlife, because there's already enough evidence and rational argument that such lighting frequently, causes accidents, creates security issues or assists criminals.
Many lights are essentially glare bombs, meaning they're bright but they're more likely to blind someone than to actually light what they're intended to. The brightness eminating from these can give the false impression that there's lots of useful light, when it's actually not lighting much at all and if anything has the potential to blind people (including motorists) and create accidents.
Furthermore, if the light fails to properly direct like (and keep in mind that most fixtures are already badly installed), there's a likeliness that it's simply increasing the contrast between the lighted areas and the shaded areas. If you happen to be concerned about criminal activity, it's not likely to help by providing more places for criminals to hide, stalk around and drag victims to. Personally when I'm walking home at night, I consider myself safer in the relative dark. At least that way I'm not as visible and standing out to someone who might want to attack me for some reason.
Plus, shining your lights onto a neighbour's property without their permission ... which many many people do ... is just plain bad manners.
Even amateur astronomers who campaign against light pollution have plenty of arguments to use that have no relation with astronomy or dark skies whatsoever. We're not claiming that people should have to walk around as if they were wearing blindfolds --- only that lights can be handled much better and more efficiently than they currently are.
Realistically, better designed and more intelligently installed lighting should benefit everyone. It's more a matter of getting past people's flawed perceptions that turning night into day surely must be a good thing... not to mention the ulterior motives that some government officials have. (Imagine what more efficient energy use could to to the Bush administration's energy policies.)
Off the eastern seaboard of the U.S. there is a tiny dot in the ocean. I've never heard of an island - let alone one large enough and populated enough to be lit up that visibly. Anyone know?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
What's going on in Mauritius: a giant reflector dish? A stadium? An intense dance scene?
Its just increasing the useful SN ratio...its out of control.
1 27.html
Picture of the day November 2000... look familiar?
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap001
I can understand if an editor doesn't remember something. But don't you have some responsibility even MILDY fact check things? A quick google search would have been SO EASY....
...for the new wall paper. Fits across two monitors like a glove.
It's not "leaking." A lot of people want their neighborhoods to be lit up in order to shine the light on would-be criminals.
Here's a more detailed picture of the U.S. for those interested.
I've thought this too. After the first atomic explosions, perhaps this sends out some unknown FTL (faster then light) energy or quantum disturbance. And being this is an artificial fision explosion, I'm guessing it has it's own signature that sticks out like a sore thumb in the universe.
If you want to send out a message to aliens, a nuclear explosion is a damn good effective one. Hell, how COULD you miss it?
Interesting to note, UFO sightings have increased again after the testing in India and Pakistan. Sounds like a correlation to me. Or...it could all be bunk. I'll let you decide. heh
Life is not for the lazy.
I'd like to see a true colour image. It'd be interesting to see different colours of light corresponding to high pressure sodium, mercury, incandescent and fluorescent lighting. A colour picture would make better wallpaper too. ;)
It really does appear that "all roads lead to Moscow". The radial spokes of light converge on it. With that in mind, the aliens might head there, thinking it the head of at least SOME kind of empire.
If you're going on sheer energy utilization, which might be the easiest thing to detect from a distance (maybe you don't want to be noticed), there's little that can compare to Japan. Following the Second Golden Rule (he who has the gold makes the rules) and treating energy as currency, they may well expect that to be the capital of the world.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Why do you hate freedom so much?
tell Hannity I love him.