India at Night Today’s Image of the Day comes thanks to the NASA Earth Observatory and features a look at southern India at night.

The photo was taken by an astronaut on board the International Space Station.  

Night light images such as this one can be helpful in providing population distribution data.

Visible here are the cities of Kochi and Coimbatore and the roadways that connect the two.

Directly below are the southern Ghats, a dark, hilly region of India that is largely unpopulated. India (Hindi: Bhārat), officially the Republic of India (Hindi: Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the second-most populous country, the seventh-largest country by land area, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the southwest, and the Bay of Bengal on the southeast, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west; China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north; and Bangladesh and Myanmar to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; its Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand, Myanmar and Indonesia. Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By 1200 BCE, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest, unfolding as the language of the Rigveda, and recording the dawning of Hinduism in India. The Dravidian languages of India were supplanted in the northern and western regions.

To the east sits the Gulf of Mannar, which links the southern Indian Peninsula to Sri Lanka.

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By Rory Arnold, Earth.com Staff Writer

Source: NASA Earth Observatory