Unprecedented New Look at Our Planet at Night

  • Released Wednesday, December 5, 2012
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In daylight our big blue marble is all land, oceans and clouds. But the night - is electric.

This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.

This video uses the Earth at night view created by NASA's Earth Observatory with data processed by NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center and combined with a version of the Earth Observatory's Blue Marble: Next Generation.

Earth at Night, Asia

Earth at Night, Europe

Earth at Night, North America

Earth at Night, South America

Whole Earth, Night

Whole Earth, Day

For More Information

See http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/NightLights/

Credits

Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio / Earth Observatory

This page was originally published on Wednesday, December 5, 2012.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, May 3, 2023 at 1:52 PM EDT.

Missions

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Datasets used in this visualization

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