“They provide a fairly straightforward means to map urban versus rural areas, and to show where the major population centers are and where they are not.” “Night time imagery provides an intuitively graspable view of our planet,” says William Stefanov, senior remote sensing scientist for the International Space Station program office. In this case, auroras, fires, and other stray light have been removed to emphasize the city lights. VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as gas flares, auroras, wildfires, city lights, and reflected moonlight. The nighttime view was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite. The new data was mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet. This new image of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012.
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