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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)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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
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...
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
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
...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.
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.
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/
How does this matter? It's neat, but it's something I'd expect in my inbox from my annoying friends, not on slashdot.
gee, that's kind of negative. I looked at it as there are still some places without light polution.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
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".
Then you realize that someone from there would think WE have nothing, because we don't own ANY livestock whatsoever.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
...to screw in a lightbulb?
Obviously there arent enough.
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.
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.
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
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.