5/3/2005: Korea at night

[Undertoad]

Perhaps a high-contrast light, versus the blackness of sea, seems brighter on the image.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I would imagine the floodlights from the boats would be at a low angle, trying to light up as much surface area as they can. Lighting the surface of the water would show up in the pictures better than the equivalent city wattage that would only show incidental light escaping from where it's used.

This gave me a flashback of the search lights on trucks that use to mark supermarket openings and new car years at the dealers. They were gas powered and looking into the unit at a low angle it didn't look like those rows of little flames could produce that powerful beam that flashed the Batsign on the clouds.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Perhaps a high-contrast light, versus the blackness of sea, seems brighter on the image.

In IR pictures I had seen raw from the satellite, ground lights and clouds both appear. Those globs of 'light' in the oceans could just as easily been clouds. Notice a shortage of cloud cover in N Korea. Just another reason that the original picture posted by UT leaves me suspicious. Were clouds electronically removed in N Korea but not in S Korea or over the ocean? We have no way of knowing. We can only speculate. But it does look so. Cloud cover would explain those lights in the Korea Strait, Sea of Japan, etc.

Yes, IR from clouds does appear in night time images.

[BrianR]

http://www.fourmilab.ch/earthview/satellite.html

You get to choose which satellite you look from (no, no Keyhole sats) and the lat and long you look at.