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."

Comments

Michael!

[pjt33]

How could you allow a link to a 40MB file into a /. article? Oh the humanity...

Re:Michael!

[Allen Zadr]

My take. Nasa has more bandwidth than God. If any domain can take the hit... Nasa's can.

Re:Michael!

[cdrudge]

However, they are now left with the difficult decision to either pay their monthly bandwidth bill or fix Hubble, but not both.

Re:Michael!

[Stephen Samuel]

These images (or, at least, a version of them) was put up in Feb of 2002. They had a daytime image, and a nighttime image. I took a couple of hours with GIMP for me to create a a composite of the two..

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),

hum

[borgdows]

interestingly, we clearly see northkorea (black) surrounded by light (southkorea and china)

Re:hum

[fishing]

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.

Alien landing sight...

[weave]

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...

What a waste!

[keoghp]

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!

Re:What a waste!

[spectrokid]

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.

Re:What a waste!

[optimus2861]

When I visited the UK a couple of years ago, what struck me was the unnatural glow that's ever-present around the horizon at night from the incredible amount of light being poured into the night sky; it looks as if it's perpetually an hour after sunset. Very few stars ever come out. Most of that light was probably from London, even though I was over an hour's drive north of the city. Being raised in rural Canada, I could always just go out into the front yard, look up, and get an awesome view of the night sky, including the Milky Way on a clear, moonless night. I feel some pity for kids being raised in those environments where they'll never be able to see it.

2002?

[Xetrov]

Anyone else notice the 2002 date on the image?

Re:again?

[donnyspi]

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.

cool

[chegosaurus]

I can see my case mod from here!

Also of interest

[Bob The Lizard]

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/

Re:River Nile and east-russian (rail)road

[laurensv]

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).

north/south korea

[havaloc]

What's telling is North and South Korea. North is almost 100% dark. See this link for a close up.

Re:Africa

[frovingslosh]

gee, that's kind of negative. I looked at it as there are still some places without light polution.

Amatuer Astronomers (and Pros) Cringe

[Average_Joe_Sixpack]

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

Oh Crap ...

[ReidMaynard]

It looks like .. yes .. I left the back porch light on, again.