NASA Sees Holiday Lights from Space
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- Produced by:
- Jefferson Beck
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- Videography:
- John Caldwell
- View full credits
For complete transcript, click here.
It’s official — our holiday lights are so bright we can see them from space. Thanks to the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite, a joint mission between NASA and NOAA, scientists are presenting a new way of studying satellite data that can illustrate patterns in holiday lights, both during Christmas and the Holy Month of Ramadan. These new tools can provide new insights into how energy consumption behaviors vary across different cultural settings.
Credits
Please give credit for this item to:
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
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Scientist
- Miguel Román (USRA)
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Producer
- Jefferson Beck (KBR Wyle Services, LLC) [Lead]
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Videographers
- John Caldwell (AIMM) [Lead]
- Rob Andreoli (AIMM)
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Support
- Holly Zell (Vantage Systems, Inc.)
Series
This visualization can be found in the following series:Datasets used in this visualization
Suomi NPP VIIRS (Collected with the VIIRS sensor)
Note: While we identify the data sets used in these visualizations, we do not store any further details, nor the data sets themselves on our site.
Related pages
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ID: 10624 Produced Video
Instagram: Seeing Holiday Lights From Space
Read moreFor all those people who have ever said, “I bet you can see my neighbor’s Christmas lights from space!” well, we now have proof that they’re right — at least in aggregate. For the first time, NASA researchers have measured the increase in Earth’s night lights during both the holiday period between Thanksgiving and New Years, in the U.S., and for the holy month of Ramadan in the Middle East.While we may not be able to see individual front yards, the satellite data has such good resolution that researchers from Yale University have been able to find correlations between political and socio-economic data for individual neighborhoods and the brightness measured from space. Researchers say being able to monitor our lighting output in this way is like being able to measure traffic on a highway, rather than just map the road itself.If we can understand the behavioral aspect of lights and energy use throughout the year it can shed light on our understanding of energy efficiency and human drivers of climate change. ||
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