NASA Earth City Lights and Google
As much as I hate light pollution, I love looking at this composite image of the Earth at night. I have a poster of this in my office that I find myself staring at more than I’d like to admit. I find it fascinating to see where we humans have congregated on the planet and where we haven’t.
It turns out that Google has added this NASA dataset to Google Earth and Peter Pesti at Georgia Tech has mashed this dataset with Google Maps.
It’s really cool to be able to zoom in, scroll around and locate which bright areas belong to which cities. I found this particularly helpful determining the cities in Europe since it is awash in light, it is hard to tell the bright blobs apart.
Peter has also made a Google Map of Europa which I thought was really neat.
I love maps. I just bought a tie with an old world style map on it and I’m actually going to wear it in public. I have no shame.
Technorati Tags: earth at night, google earth at night, google maps
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POSTED IN: Astronomy Porn
2 opinions for NASA Earth City Lights and Google
DarkSkyMcNight
Aug 10, 2007 at 2:32 am
This is great news. The other day I was looking for a light pollution map with a usable zoom function.
julie
Aug 10, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Just as long as the tie matches…. I’ll help you pick out something to wear with that tie. Oh, believe me, if you go out with me, you WILL have shame. ;)
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