Black Marble Poster: Earth at Night
(Click images to see full-size)
This poster dramatically shows the Earth as viewed from outer space during hours of night. It is extremely high detailed and makes a great artistic poster.
While we've all seen satellite imagery taken during daylight in mapping applications and software, we often forget about how the earth looks in hours of darkness. Much of that changed in late 2012 when NASA released its nighttime satellite views of earth.
The satellite imagery released was based on data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite during the year of 2012, both in April and October.
Travelling a staggering 512 miles (824 km) above the surface of the earth, the Suomi Satellite made a total of 312 orbits over a total period of 22 days, capturing nighttime data of every corner of the planet.
During those orbits, the data was collected with ultra-sensitive sensors that can pick up light sources emitted from the Earth's surface. Man-made cities are the most prominent source of light from the planet, but the sensors can also pick up reflected moonlight, auroras, wildfires, and even fires from oil and gas extraction sites.
Once collected, the light data was then superimposed and combined with existing NASA Blue-Marble imagery, which is world-wide coverage of daytime satellite views of the planet. The combination of data sets immediately led the result to be referred to as the "Black Marble".
The full earth views, such as the view in this poster, are actually composites of much smaller and higher-resolution views. That means that literally hundreds of individual images of nighttime data were combined and manipulated to simulate exactly what the world would look like when from far away in space.
At Outlook Maps, we modified the NASA images even further to enhance the images for easy viewing and quality printing.
Offering such a unique and unfamiliar view of planet earth, this nighttime satellite map is sure to inspire curiosity about our planet from any viewer.
Additionally, nighttime images of Earth really illustrate the extent to which the human footprint covers the entire planet - in all continents and any type of environment. This poster on display will definitely help create an awareness about the impact humans have on planet Earth and help to promote respect for our natural world and responsible human behavior.
And of course...The poster looks really cool!
