Black Marble aka Earth

[TheHalf™]

NASA is known for its "Blue Marble" images, which show Earth's sunlit disk as seen from space — and now it's making a splash with the nighttime view, nicknamed the "Black Marble."

This picture of the night lights of North and South America is just one frame in the Black Marble series, which is based on data from the Suomi NPP satellite and was unveiled today during the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. The image has been built up from readings made by the weather/climate satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite, or VIIRS.

It'd be tough to snap this kind of picture at any single moment, because of cloud cover as well as seasonal changes in the way sunlight falls on our planet. Suomi NPP's handlers had an easier job, because the satellite could make multiple passes in April and October. Those fly-overs produced data that could be presented as a full-disk nighttime view of Earth.

NASA says the VIIRS instrument's "day-night band" is well-suited to pick up on dim signals such as city lights as well as gas flares, auroras, wildifires and reflected moonlight. For the Black Marble images, stray sources of light were removed during processing to emphasize the city lights.

"Artificial lighting is an excellent remote-sensing observable and proxy for human activity," Chris Elvidge, who leads the Earth Observation Group at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Geophysical Data Center.

Link 1--->http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Q3YYwIsMHzw

Link 2--->http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/NPP/news/earth-at-night.html

TheHalf™

[Whysocky123]

I’ve asked a bunch of times on different sites for a way to watch a specific piece of land from space, but people either tell me to use Google, which doesn’t work for me, or suggest paid platforms where you can totally do it, but it costs money. I’m still looking for a simple way to get satellite imagery.

[Cermit]

Why doesn’t Google Earth work for you? Not enough quality or detail? Look, I don’t know how high-quality or detailed the free versions of online platforms are, but I’ve used EOSDA LandViewer myself. Here’s a site with a satellite feed that updates constantly, and you can just open the page, type in the address or location you need, and check it out. If that kind of result works for you, then great. It’s all online. But if you want high-res images with all kinds of data and access to historical shots, then yeah, you’ll probably have to get a subscription.