Have a look at North Korea vs South Korea. I’ve been to both countries… and yes, North Korea is very dark (and very quiet) at night.
That struck me as odd too. An electrical storm maybe?
There’s a whole chapter in Denis Wood’s 1990s book The Power of Maps about this.
Growing up in western Minnesota, the highway roughly paralleled the railroad line, and there were towns regularly spaced along there. I was told the reason for the regular spacing was to pickup/drop off freight. The towns grew up around stations, and stations were placed so that a farmer could get to one in a horse-drawn wagon, and then get home again before dark. So they are placed at something less than a half-days travel by horse and wagon apart.
I think that’s a more likely explanation, since the towns are much closer together than would be needed for steam locomotive re-supply – with tenders, they can go 40-60 miles between stops.
Already explained upthread - those are gas flares from the oil and natural gas fields.
True. See the Christaller and Losch economic geography explanations mentioned above. Probably a good overview in Wikipedia under “Central Place Theory.”
Why are these being touted as such a cool thing? Haven’t we seen this sort of thing for decades? Don’t get me wrong, their cool, but am I missing something about these pics that we haven’t seen before?
I posted the original question, and I had NOT seen those features in earlier NASA pictures. Maybe you had. This is why I raised the issue.
As I understand it , these images are making the news because they are the first publicly released night-side Earth images from the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite. From the NASA page:
“The new sensor, the day-night band of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), is sensitive enough to detect the nocturnal glow produced by Earth’s atmosphere and the light from a single ship in the sea. Satellites in the U.S. Defense Meteorological Satellite Program have been making observations with low-light sensors for 40 years. But the VIIRS day-night band can better detect and resolve Earth’s night lights.”
So it’s the same sort of observation that’s been done before, but with better sensitivity and resolution.
Note too, that this incredible whole-earth picture is a creation from several months worth of night time shots. They digitally combined shots of each section, picking ones where that were clear and with no cloud cover. There’s nearly always clouds covering parts of the earth on any one day. (Plus, obviously, you can’t get it all in one shot – it isn’t night time over the whole earth at once!)
Wow, it really puts more emphasis on how vastly empty some midwest and mountain states are. The large town/small city I grew up in in New York, which currently has fewer than 30,000 residents including tiny suburbs, is HUGE compared to many of the isolated blips out there.
That’s quite insightful, I think, particularly when you look at a map of Iowa that shows the counties. They are almost perfectly evenly drawn and spaced. http://www.cvcia.org/content/wealth.transfer/index.html
A person from the west would almost certainly have the opposite take, that the area east of the Mississippi looks dreadfully crowded.
[quote=“GreasyJack, post:2, topic:643348”]
Yeah, the lights in the Gulf are probably gas flares off oil rigs.
[./QUOTE]
Lightning is also a possibility.
The resolution of this shot is noticeably better than prior ones. For one, note the faint blueish tint to the empty areas of the West: that’s reflected moonlight. Also, in the West look to the lines that mark the Interstate highways… that is picking up car and semi headlights from space, man! I’m pretty familiar with the area around Janesville, Wisconsin and noted that this is the first time I’ve seen Janesville and the smaller town to its immediate northeast, Milton resolved as separate blobs of light. There’s also a small dot of light north of Janesville and west of Milton that is almost certainly the lights from a rest area on I-90.
And the gas flares… quite striking (and a little frightening when you consider the climate change implications) in their own right.
What i had in mind was the occasional geographical argument where people look at a map and say “wow, look at this huge sea of red engulfing such a tiny area of blue! We really are a silent majority!”
No, no, no… They started shooting the mosaics in the west first, then as they approached Mississippi, everybody began decorating their houses and businesses with Christmas lights and finished the project just recently.
“Awww, everybody look at America’s christmas lights! Boy, Canada is gonna be so envious.”
Today I noticed another unexpectedly bright area: Hazard County and surrounding coal-mining areas of eastern Kentucky and western West Virginia. There must be open-pit strip mining that goes on at night, same as Australia.
I thought that was a map of counties that voted for Obama in the light and the ones that voted for Romney in the dark.
What’s the descending, darker Italy-ish-looking blob from Washington state?