Atlas of astronaut photos of Earth at night

Miguel, Alejandro Sánchez de; Castaño, José Gómez; Zamorano, J.; Pascual, S.; Ángeles, María de los; Cayuela, Luis; Martinez, Guillermo Martín; Challupner, Peter; Kyba, Christopher C. M.

doi:10.1093/astrogeo/atu165

Cited by 31 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 2 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These photos could offer a unique view of the Earth at night in its true colors, and are freely accessible via Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov). To address the difficulty in finding an ISS image of a specific city among millions of images, the atlas of astronaut photos of Earth at night [52] was developed to allow easy access to the images (http://www.citiesatnight.org). Although the astronaut photos can reflect more details of the Earth with a spatial resolution from 5 to 200 m [53], technical challenges in radiometric calibration and unevenly temporal and spatial distributions of these original photos hinder the wide application of ISS images.…”

Section: Other Satellites and Cubesatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Nighttime light observations from remote sensing provide us with a timely and spatially explicit measure of human activities, and therefore enable a host of applications such as tracking urbanization and socioeconomic dynamics, evaluating armed conflicts and disasters, investigating fisheries, assessing greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, and analyzing light pollution and health effects. The new and improved sensors, algorithms, and products for nighttime lights, in association with other Earth observations and ancillary data (e.g., geo-located big data), together offer great potential for a deep understanding of human activities and related environmental consequences in a changing world. This paper reviews the advances of nighttime light sensors and products and examines the contributions of nighttime light remote sensing to perceiving the changing world from two aspects (i.e., human activities and environmental changes). Based on the historical review of the advances in nighttime light remote sensing, we summarize the challenges in current nighttime light remote sensing research and propose four strategic directions, including: Improving nighttime light data; developing a long time series of consistent nighttime light data; integrating nighttime light observations with other data and knowledge; and promoting multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary analyses of nighttime light observations.

show abstract

Section: Other Satellites and Cubesatsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives

et al. 2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The "Atlas of astronaut photos of Earth at night" was developed to solve this problem. The Atlas provides an open directory of geotagged images of cities at night, with links to the original images at the NASA site [22]. The main page of the Atlas is at http://www.citiesatnight.org/, and access to the database itself is available at http://www.nightcitiesiss.org/.…”

Section: Data Sourcesmentioning

confidence: 99%

High-Resolution Imagery of Earth at Night: New Sources, Opportunities and Challenges

et al. 2014

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Images of the Earth at night are an exceptional source of human geographical data, because artificial light highlights human activity in a way that daytime scenes do not. The quality of such imagery dramatically improved in 2012 with two new spaceborne detectors. The higher resolution and precision of the data considerably expands the scope of possible applications. In this paper, we introduce the two new data sources and discuss their potential limitations using three case studies. Data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite Day-Night Band (VIIRS DNB) is shown to have sufficient resolution to identify major sources of waste light, such as airports, and we find considerable variation in the peak radiance of the world's largest airports. Nighttime imagery brings "cultural footprints" to light: DNB data reveals that American cities emit many times more light per capita than German cities and that cities in the former East of Germany emit more light per capita than those in the former West. Photographs from the International Space Station, the second new source of imagery, provide some limited spectral information, as well as street-level resolution. These images may be of greater use for epidemiological studies than the lower resolution DNB data.Remote Sens. 2015, 7 2

show abstract

“…The last decade has seen a rapid increase in research into artificial light in the nighttime environment (Table 1). This increased attention can be attributed to several factors, including: recognition of the impacts of artificial light on ecology and health [1,2,3], increasing amounts of artificial light in the environment [4,5], improved quality of imagery from space [6,7], the current global change in lighting technology [8], and increasing quality, ease, instruments, and methods for measuring light at starlight intensities [9,10].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challenges

Hánel

Posch

Ribas

et al. 2018

Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer

236

200

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Measuring the brightness of the night sky has become an increasingly important topic in recent years, as artificial lights and their scattering by the Earth's atmosphere continue spreading around the globe. Several instruments and techniques have been developed for this task. We give an overview of these, and discuss their strengths and limitations. The different quantities that can and should be derived when measuring the night sky brightness are discussed, as well as the procedures that have been and still need to be defined in this context. We conclude that in many situations, calibrated consumer digital cameras with fisheye lenses provide the best relation between ease-of-use and wealth of obtainable information on the night sky. While they do not obtain full spectral Quality Meter" continue to be a viable option for long-term studies of night sky brightness and for studies conducted from a moving platform. Accurate interpretation of such data requires some understanding of the colour composition of the sky light. We recommend supplementing long-term time series derived with such devices with periodic all-sky sampling by a calibrated camera system and calibrated luxmeters or luminance meters.

show abstract

Atlas of astronaut photos of Earth at night

Cited by 31 publications

References 2 publications

Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives

Applications of Satellite Remote Sensing of Nighttime Light Observations: Advances, Challenges, and Perspectives

High-Resolution Imagery of Earth at Night: New Sources, Opportunities and Challenges

Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challenges

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About