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Sports
& Recreation . A
View from the Other Direction
With Spring warming things up, one of the simple pleasures of life can be going out at night to look at the stars. Sure, winter offers a more spectacular display, when the night is longer and the sky, therefore, darker & deeper. But the warmer weather means it's easier to stay out there longer. Of course, as populations grow and development takes up more and more square miles, it becomes increasingly difficult to find a place where the night sky isn't at least partially dimmed by ambient ground light. This is most true of areas in the Northeast ... though, as you can see from the photo above, there are still vast tracts of land, and even larger tracts over the oceans, where no lights shine. ... That said, these images of Earth at Night -- actually made from composites of hundreds of pictures taken by the orbiting DMSP [Defense Meterological Satellite Program] satellites -- are nothing short of spectacular. As the the NASA lit points out, a closer inspection will reveal individual cities, rivers, and more ... areas along which the greatest increases in population have taken place and, therefore, where the greatest concentration of artificial lighting occurs. Notice, for example, the density of light along the Nile River, along with the virtual absence of lights straying too far from it. ... Or the heavy concentration of lights at the Hawaiian Islands, the only such concentration in all of the central Pacific. ... Of course, even a glance at our own neighborhood will show -- from the Eastern Seaboard to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi -- an area that, per square mile, is probably the most lit up place on the face of the earth. However, closer inspection, for example of the Northern Mediterranean coastline, will reveal even greater density, though not as vast an area. We'll leave you here to pick out your own details. The photos below link to larger images. Simply click on them.
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