Earth at night seen from space.

Best viewed fullscreen. Timelapse images courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center, ISS043-E-102202-103235

From up there, borders disappear and humanity looks like one big family. 🌍

Any light you can see from space is wasted energy. Humans waste 50% of what they generate.

How inspiring ✨️

Fun fact: astronauts on the ISS see about 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets every day. Nights like this one last only about 45 minutes.

Those lights do real good, too: NASA's Black Marble data uses night views like this to help emergency teams spot power outages and reach communities after disasters.

The wild part is every one of those tiny dots is a whole town full of people sure their problems are the biggest thing on the planet. 🌎

This is insane 😨

City lights from orbit are a map of human habits. Edison's US 223,898 (1880) claimed a lamp "giving light by incandescence" from "a filament of carbon of high resistance," the key to wiring up many bulbs at once. LEDs run the show now. What's the first city you spot?

"They're alive!"

Every one of those lights is a family making dinner, a kid doing homework, someone heading home. After my travels, what stays with me isn't how big the world is but how alike we all are. 🌍

Beautiful!!🤩

WORLD SPACE

The ISS crew sees 16 sunsets a day, and views like this in between.

wow, I got dizzy watching this.ouch

Night at usa or night at russia?

One of the strangest lights on that map isn't on land. In 2012 a NASA-NOAA satellite found a "city" glowing 200 to 300 miles off Argentina. No town, no gas wells. Just squid boats, some carrying 100+ lamps each, lined up along the edge of Argentina's fishing zone.

our world is beautiful