Awesome Time lapsed video of earth

[Guest jackdm3]

Video: excellent! Audio: not so much.

I think it's Tangerine Dream. Or at least a generic attempt to copy.

[strickj]

Neat0! I can see my house from here!

That squiggly line reappears at 4:37 (I think that was the time). It is the Pakistani border

India-Pakistan Borderlands at Night : Image of the Day

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I went looking for the answer to that and found this NASA site telling how they photograph from space. It's far more complex than I thought. They also say that if the lights are mercury vapor, the cities will appear blue-green, while sodium vapor will yield yellow-orange.

NASA - Cities at Night: An Orbital Perspective

Thanks monkeylizard, great article.

I'm not well-traveled, but the lights from the air were striking on a trip to western canada a few years ago. The trip both ways was mostly over northern USA. It was early march and the trip out there was a day trip. Still snowed-in it looked desolate like the surface of the moon. Spent a lot of time sight-seeing out the window with a monocular and there were only rare visible signs of human occupation "at altitude" 40,000 feet or whatever.

On the night trip back a week later over the same barren snowed-in north, there was no time that lights of civilization were not visible. The lights were not typically dense, but was interesting that so many people were living out there in farms or small towns and "had the lights on".