Another fascinating picture.

Here

I've seen that before.. but it is amazing to think of how much population there must be to light up entire coast lines of the US.

In another thread, either on AP or DP, Methos (I think) stated that this really isn't "just" a picture, that the lights have been amplified. Another thing to realize is that it isn't nighttime over all the Earth at the same time, as implied by the picture.

I don't remember making such a statement, but whoever did may have been right.

The page is incorrect about the origin of the picture. It was not taken from the space station, and I don't think the space station orbit would allow all of the pictures to be taken. According to NASA (at the link on the picture), it is composed of a collection of pictures taken by Defense Meteorological Satellites, which are/were more than twice as far from the Earth as the space station. Putting all the pictures together would surely require som tweaking of the images and it wouldn't surprise me if further twaeking were done to pull out the lights.

Regardless, it's a phenomenal picture and was my computer wallpaper for a while.