Light Pollution is the bane of astronomers everywhere. We’ve been complaining about it for decades and for the most part, get ignored for our efforts. Some local authorities are more clued in and have added shielding to street lamps for example or implemented lights-out policies at certain times of the night.
But it’s a losing battle. The ever-expansion of our cities and more illumination added to our roads has made Earth light up like a Christmas Tree once darkness falls. The above image shows how bad things are globally.
The image of the Earth at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands.
conphotography.com is a Dublin (Ireland) based photography business that’s taken that image and built an image explorer app around it so you can pan over and zoom into it and see how bad light pollution is where you live and elsewhere around the world. Use the fullscreen option for best effect!
You can peruse the image here or by clicking the image above.
Filed under: Earth
