Night earth map
At night, the lights people make trace cities, roads and coastlines. NASA has mapped them from space, and you can spin them on our globe.
Open the night globeWhere the night image comes from
The night view is NASA’s Black Marble map of Earth at night, as observed in 2016. NASA says the data were reprocessed with compositing methods that pick the best cloud-free nights in each month over each land mass. So the map is a cloud-free composite of many nights, not a single night. NASA offers it as a global image at three sizes, the sharpest at 500 meters per pixel. We use a smaller version made for fast loading.
NASA describes satellite images of Earth at night as a public curiosity and a tool for research for at least 25 years. NASA says such global maps are made “every decade or so”.
How to read the map
- Bright clusters are cities and towns. Big urban areas glow even at this scale.
- Lines of light often follow highways, rivers and coasts, where towns sit close together.
- Dark areas are deserts, forests, mountains, ice sheets and oceans, where few people live. A dark area is not always empty. Some places with many people use less outdoor lighting.
- Lights at sea can come from ships, fishing fleets and oil and gas platforms.
Night in the satellite view
In the Satellite mode, the globe shows the day side and the night side at the same time. The line between them is worked out from the current time. On the dark side you see the same Black Marble lights, more faintly. Near the line, the globe fades the way the sky does at dusk.
Things to try
- Find the Nile in Egypt: a thin bright line through dark desert.
- Compare North Korea and South Korea.
- Follow the lit coast of the eastern United States from Boston to Washington, D.C.
- Look at the size of the dark areas in Australia, Siberia and the Amazon.