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How one NASA image tells dozens of stories

submitted by ant

2 years 2 months 3 weeks ago

"... In 2016, NASA used the Suomi NPP weather satellite to create a high resolution image of the earth at night. It can help us better understand the current developments and conflicts underway.
The amount of light pollution is most severe in heavily populated areas, as well as in regions of high prosperity.
In Europe, the Benelux region and the densely populated Po-Valley are so bright, that the individual towns blend into one big sea of light.
Especially in the Arab world, the extraction of oil creates bright lights from the flaring of gas.
And in Africa, you can trace the path of the Nile River, which, as the lifeline of egypt, attracts civilization and is filled with commercial boats.
This image points to the global challenges posed by the steadily increasing world population. And while man-made borders can not be seen during the day, the lines of political origin become apparent at night, but appear all the more absurd and artificial.
When viewed during daylight, the human influence on our planet is less obvious.
But this single image highlights the social divides and political strife from both the past and the present..."

From http://www.cannotunsee.net/post/674022171711029248/how-one-nasa-image-tells-dozens-of-stories-in.

2 Comments

noims

says...

I've had this as my desktop wallpaper in work for about 10 years or so and I still get people coming over looking at it.

spawnflagger

says...

interesting video, but many of his same examples were in this 2012 NASA video: https://youtu.be/Q3YYwIsMHzw

Also, not to detract it's usefulness (and cool factor), but many people seeing this photo think that's how the Earth actually looks at night - it isn't. That composite uses satellite data from Suomi NPP's VIIRS sensor, which can detect much dimmer light than the human eye, and part of the compositing process was to normalize brightness of individual pixels (so dim lights get brighter, and bright lights don't washout adjacent pixels). More details here:
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html

Even some cool night-time videos from ISS (example: https://youtu.be/FG0fTKAqZ5g ) are made using still photos with long exposure time (1+ seconds) See FAQ.

This did lead me to a live webcam from ISS that I didn't know existed: https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/ESRS/HDEV/