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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."
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.
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If you scroll to the bottom, it even says it was a previous APOD... from 2002.
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
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
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?
Yes, the line matches for a big part with the trans siberian railway. You can also notices how Moskou is the centre of a star, Paris has a bit of the same effect in France (both very centralised governments).
As far as Russia goes, that's probably the Trans-Siberia Railway. Amazing how development follows transportation routes, right? Reminds me of playing Railroad Tycoon or SimCity :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
you want xearth (or wearth). It makes a desktop wallpaper image that is updated every x seconds. And you can have the light/dark barrier displayed, and it moves, and the earth even wobbles up and down depending on the season.
:)
Unfortunately you can't see the lights coming on and off... unless you download the source and get coding
Because people build settlements along it. There arne't very many other good places to settle in a desert.
Go for it. The Earth Observatory Blue Marble site has plenty of low-to-high res pictures of the earth, with clouds, with ice, etc.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica (I would link, but I got access through my schools private subscription): "Ninety-nine percent of the Egyptian population lives on only 3.5 percent of the land. Most of them are in the Nile River valley and the large, fertile delta of the river."
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.
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/
Now, taking this into consideration, the photo will yield more information. You can, for instance, quite clearly trace the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway (the narrow strip of lights running through most of Russia). In the US, the Western part was settled (by the Europeans, that is) much later than the Eastern part; as a consequence, the transportation infrastructure is less developed and it really shows (there are probably also differences in the landscape -- a city is more likely to be built in the plains that in the Great Rocky Mountains).
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
"Moskou" is the dutch (and maybe others) spelling of Moscow.
bash$
The JPL has one, and its zoomable to: http://wmt.jpl.nasa.gov/
There's this desktop app for OSX that uses two such images nicely
I'm sure I used to have a free clock app for Mac OS 7.5 that did something similar...
UK Laptops
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.
Here's one from a few years ago. It's darker so you can see the lights better.
If you notice after clicking on the picture in the "picture of the day" site, the picture is dated August 11th 2002. Actually the first time I saw this picture was in a cosmology lecture around may last year. I still love it.
The "Orient Express" was a luxury train which ran from Paris to Istanbul. What you've identified is the great Trans-Siberian Railway, leading from western Russia all the way to Vladivostok. It was indeed the corridor for Russian settlement in Siberia.
All employees must wash hands before seeking equitable relief.
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
It's gotta be a typo... the page of hi-res images lists a 4mb tiff image that is described as "full-res".
If there were a 40mb tiff would that be a "10x full-res" image?
"I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious." - Albert Einstein
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.
If you pick up a map of the US Midwest & Plains, you'll notice that most of the states are dividied into counties, and those counties are mostly rectangular. I suppose this makes dividing resources easier if they're all roughly the same size, and rectangular makes the dividing easy. Where they're not rectangular there's usually a natural feature that makes a "close enough" dividing line that's easier to survey than an imaginary line in the dirt.
... gridlike.
The counties are then (often) divided into townships or precincts -- again, rectangular mostly. Each county has a main city (or a "seat") where records are kept, courts are located, etc... The counties are then connected to each other by state roads. So a Midwest map looks
For example, I live in Michigan in Oakland County which is roughly a square. The county seat is Pontiac, which is almost centered in the county. The major Interstate freeways (built in the 50's and 60's) connect large cities directly (Pontiac, Lansing, Flint, Detroit) but the minor ones (state roads, 2 lane highways: M24, M15, M14, M53) are mostly north-south or east-west and quite straight except where they avoid lakes. A more sparesly populated county like Lapeer or Shiawassee is even more regular.
The US Midwest and Plains states were divvied up into political units by surveyors while they were still sparsely settled. Contrast to the US East where political boundaries had to be drawn around existing settlements and roads followed existing paths -- this results in irregularly shaped counties and roads that meander every which way.
Get off my lawn.
Try going west instead of north. When I was in the little town of Wroxton, which is about an hour roughly west of Heathrow, I was stunned by how much I could see. The whole Milky Way, shooting stars by the dozens, including one very impressive fireball! Even in rural Iowa I have never seen anything like it.
xplanet
and for windows users
winxplanetbg
using it now, not open GL, but constantly updating the background...downloadable cloud maps too
In the US, the Western part was settled (by the Europeans, that is) much later than the Eastern part; as a consequence, the transportation infrastructure is less developed and it really shows...
I dunno, I wouldn't say transportation is less developed in the US west, just developed later and rooted in different technology, mainly automobiles. Western cities tend to be more spread out because of that, and the west as a whole is less densly populated than the east, not because it hasn't had the time to develop as much as the east, but because during the time of European settlement, the west was best suited for farming to supply the existing cities of east. Truckloads have been written about this, but my point is simply that western transportation has developed differently, not less.
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
You might want to start here http://xplanet.sourceforge.net/, at the least you'd get both the day & night images.
XPlanet does a wallpaper for X-windows or MS windows that runs in the background and shows day/night illumination plus near real-time cloud cover. Ambitious folks could probably mod it to do the equivalent as a screen saver.
There's this little place called Prudhoe Bay. Maybe some of you have heard of it. ;-)
All in all a neat picture. Reminds me of one reason I live up here....I can look outside at night and see stars, the aurora and all the wonderful stuff because I don't have millions of people snuggled up next to me.