Earth @ Night

Because of the requirements of social distancing during the Coronavirus crisis, the EarthView team is using this blog to offer a variety of new geography lessons and activities -- please explore, as some have recently been posted.

We are also going to be offering some new ways to visualize the world while our giant maps and globes are safely tucked away. The first of these is an exploration of a famous satellite image that was produced in November 2000 and reproduced on thousands of printed posters since then.

BONUS: With the help of colleagues at RISE-UP! in Fitchburg, we have created a prequel to this video; it describes in greater detail some of the concepts used in the main video. Together, these videos comprise 40 minutes of instruction.

NOTE: Correction: this video includes an incorrect guess of South Africa's population. I meant only to say that greater Johannesburg has about 1/6 of the country's total population.

During the presentation, I promised to include a link to my personal experience of a solar eclipse in Chile in 2019.

Explore the image and technical details by clicking on the links below.

Astronomy Picture of the Day November 27, 2000
Imagery from the former DMSP program