Last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting, NASA unveiled a series of new images of the world at night. You have probably seen lots of these images on the web (I have posted some of them here from time to time) but not quite with this resolution! Here is a sample of the image of the United States.
Now that's pretty good, but I have always wanted a nice interactive version where you could zoom in on it and pan around a bit. Well I got my wish with the Blue Marble Navigator. You can pan and zoom in on an area of interest anywhere on the world. The details you can get are amazing. You can trace out the U.S. Interstate highways system, fires from oil fields around the world, lights from the Japanese fishing fleet and the Trans-Siberian railroad. You can learn a lot but clicking around looking at lighting patterns. Here is a zoom of the Tucson area.
You can really see the boundaries of the town. I can even pick out Speedway (I live just off it) and where it dead ends into Saguaro National Park East, one of my frequent spots for astrophotography.
Some of the older pics you see of the world at night have such low resolution, they make it look like there are lights literally everywhere. With these pics, you get a better and more realistic view of where the cities and lights are. Of course, the real problem is that these city light can be seen quite a ways out (sometimes hundreds of miles).
So go ahead, click around the map, find your hometown and see how it looks.
Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.
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12 comments:
That's a fun toy to play with. There's still a few, small dark areas in western Racine and Kenosha counties.
this is really cool, off to play and see what I find - Thanks Hale!!
Looks very cool. I'll poke into it when I get some down time. Thanks for sharing.
Hale...very nice. We need to talk to Mary...I think she left her lights on. lol
Neat. If you look real close on the National Photo, you can see "I left the light on"
No Toad, that's the Motel 6...
Hey now. Jed, are you sure it's not my glowing personality and charm?
Thanks Hale, I will have to share this later with someone who will love it.
Point well taken Mary...I will take this all into consideration, and get back to you. lol
Thanks Jed
Someone needs to turn off some of those lights in the midwest... oh, wait, our mayor is doing just that!
Look how dark it is by BLB's house. What if we get lost? What about the boogey man? Oh, nooooo!
Well, at least shield the lights and make sure the don't unnecessarily light up the night sky. I use Tucson and Albuquerque as a contrast. Both metro areas have about 750,000 people (2010 census) but if you zoom in, you can definitely see Tucson is a paler shade of yellow indicating less light going up. Tucson is known for having good lighting ordinances.
I see too many incandescent bulbs out there... it's time to switch over to LED's or at the very least CFL's.
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