My question, though, has to do with all those areas of light in what would seem to be western Australia. Any map of Australia demonstrates that there is very, very little development in west central Australia, and certainly no major urban centres. Look at this for example. Yet, as the shot from space at night reveals, there are lights there. Lots and lots of light. Where is it coming from? What is it due to?
My guess is opencast mines operating 24/7. Do your light sources correlate to this map ofAustralian mines (zoom in for better detail). My browser wouldn’t open your linked images for some reason.
No idea, but here is a huge 5MB close up of Australia taken from NASA here. Whatever it is outshines all of Australia’s cities and goes against what you’d expect to see from their population density. They don’t appear to be shaped like cities. These wildfires have the same look but that would be a lot of territory to be on fire.
There are very high resolution versions of the pictures also available. Here. It is clear that these huge splodges are not man-made - but are probably clouds. The area of country these splodges cover is utterly barren. There isn’t anything there that could burn. The capital cities are easy to see, and they are much smaller than many of these clouds.
No forests there but there is significant vegetation. Fires are very common in the dry parts of Australia. Those photos were also taken during hundreds of orbits over many days. It is unlikely that all of those fires were burning at once.
In retropsect they probably are fires. There is no forest there, but there are vast areas of semi-arid grassland. The detailed shape of the splodges is consistent with a fire front. In many places you can see the advancing front and the burnt out area behind - and a large illuminated cloud moving away from the front - consistent with smoke being driven ahead of the advancing front.
A lot of inland Oz has an annual cycle of grass growth, dry-off and fire. (Although it is not reliable, years of drought can result in very little growth, and years of good rain lots.) I am surprised to see it extend so far south, and also surprised that the satellite caught what is a fairly transient phenomenon, but there it is.
However this contradicts the commentary in the video, and does not provide any other reasonable explanation. It does explain why grassfires can be seen - NASA have probably been doing a bit of curve tweaking to make them so bright compared to the cities.
There is more than twenty fires happening in WA as I type this, fires a big thing in Australia,you would easily see wide ranging grass fire from space.
