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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."
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$
It would be neat to use some kind of tool to compare the two pics and see how much brighter/dimmer we are in 2004 than 2000.
I am Belgian (VERY bright on the map). In Belgium, all motorways are lit by lampposts all of the time (don't ask why). It does mean it has become completely impossible to see more then 2-3 stars at night. Light-pollution has become an issue and the astronomers are organising a "dark" night once a year, asking municipalities and private people to turn off the flood-lights. There are now standards on how much light a lamppost is allowed to shine upwards.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
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...
My take. Nasa has more bandwidth than God. If any domain can take the hit... Nasa's can.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
> Why is half of Texas so dim?
Presumably you're setting up for a joke about which half is missing its idiot...
But seriously, I noticed the same think. The whole USA seems to be divided by a line that runs straight north from the most southerly point of Texas. Is that for real, or just an artifact of the image-making process?
Other interesting stuff:
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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
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.
You can get books, and posters of these things... like this book which includes reconnaissance Satellite Images: of North Korea. more here or here. (If you click on see all home and garden items on .com you can see the poster range...) mmm amazon is bizzare sometimes.
UK Laptops
How does this matter? It's neat, but it's something I'd expect in my inbox from my annoying friends, not on slashdot.
I have this image as wallpaper, spanned across two 19" LCDs.
Yes, it does fix the aspect ratio problem (almost, I intentionally leave off Antarctica to show the rest larger), and it makes fastastic "wallpaper".
There's a really good reason for this.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, most of the buddy-buddy relationships with other communist countries were scratched and it turned into "every man for themselves".
North Korea used to have a constant supply of oil and coal and other energy needs from Russia, but this was abruptly terminated when Russia started saying "Er, you gotta pay full price now". The North Koreans had no cash to pay with, and thus began the rapid spiralling decline of all their energy production, transport, manufacturing and most importantly, food production. Food production in particular was a double-edged sword, needing not only oil to harvest and transport food, but also petroleum products and energy to produce fertiliser for use in North Korea's poor soil. With most of the country starving, and most machinery lying idle and rusting, things have been getting exponentially worse. They now have peasants tilling fields by hand, emaciated, underfed, with no chance of anything changing, unless they join the army, where they are emaciated, underfed and using rifles.
With little or nothing to trade with, North Korea has resorted to high-profit, (relatively) low-staffing-requirements industries like missiles, nuclear power and weapons, and (possibly) any other sorts of chemical or bio weapons to fund their dismal little empire.
Thus we now have them in a position where they have nothing to lose, and a little bitter and twisted.
To the US's credit, there were attempts to try and help Pyongyang out of this dead-end situation, by offering assistance in building reactors that were more efficient and would not produce weapons-grade materials. Unfortunatley, the Clinton administration never came good with their promises, and then the Bush administration came into power and... well, you know the rest. With the likes of John "Deputy Dawg" Bolton doing negotiations with them it's a small miracle South Korea or Japan aren't small burning heaps by now. That's if NK actually do have any nukes. Who knows... the entire government is crazy and senile, so it's hard to guess what they are doing or thinking.
And it seems that you can still see the ancient silk trade route through Middle Asia leading from Middle East to China
Raf
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.
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"
6 Billion Humans Breathing create more CO2 in one year than does burning fossil fuel...
6 Billion humans * 600cc lung capacity * 12% exhaled CO2/vol * 44g/mol * 10 breaths/min * 1440 mins/day * 365 days/yr plugged into ideal gas law gives about 4E15 grams of CO2 created by Humanity annually
Taking gasoline as an example
The reaction of octane (the primary component of gasoline) is:
2(C8H18) + 25O2 -> 16CO2 + 18H2O
So, for every 228g of gasoline you burn, you get 704g of CO2.
At about 779g/l for gasoline, you have to burn about 1.7 TRILLION LITERS of gasoline to get enough CO2 to match Human output for a year
A Barrel of crude has 159 liters, and the 10 top oil producing countries have proven reserves of 836 billion barrels as of 2003. The refining efficiency from crude to gasoline is about 25% on a good day
So, there is enough crude in these top reserves to create 33.2 trillion liters of gasoline
So, even if we COULD match human output by burning gasoline, we could only do so for about 20 years before running out.
Of course, this "back of the napkin" analysis depends on some assumptions, and doesn't take into account naturally produced CO2, CO2 exhaled by animals, or other sources of CO2. This is not meant to start a flamewar, only to put things in perspective. Fossil fuels are not the enemy you think they are.
An APOD picture I like better was posted June 23 - of the Venus transit of the Sun. The higher resolution version, at 1500 by 1500, makes the best desktop pic, although it will need a little work in the GIMP or PhotoShop to make it fit your desktop's aspect ratio.
To give you an idea of the size of Texas, the distance between the eastmost city (Texarkana) and westmost city (El Paso) is nearly equal to the distance between El Paso and Los Angeles, CA.
I was curious about Scotland (posting this from Edinburgh...) which is largely dark as well. The central belt (Glasgow - Edinburgh, via Stirling) is well-lit, but the Highlands, particularly on the West Coast are dark. Geography, I'd guess, in Scotland's case - the region is very mountainous.
The Highlands (West coast of Scotland) are populated, but at a density of about 8 people per square kilometre. Compare that to Edinburgh (1725 per square kilometre) and Glasgow(3300 per square kilometre). Source: Scotland's population
It's mainly due to economic growth in the past; Glasgow and Edinburgh both attracted large numbers of rural workers when shipbuilding and manufacturing where at their peak. There were also the Highland clearances where the wealthy landowners sold their land to English landowners who then had the residents deported to either Australia or Canada (around 12 million people around the world claim Scottish ancestry).
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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
CAUTION: the following link is a 2MB JPEG that expands to an 8Kx4K image .. that would be about 100megabytes as an uncompressed TIFF
(it's here). With only 380MB of RAM on my box, this chokes Mozilla, but loads OK if I save it and open it with gqview..
I have a second image of North America only that's a bit more manageable in size (1024x768),
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.