The city lights of Western Europe
The city lights of Western Europe. Today’s Image of the Day from NASA Earth Observatory features a nighttime view of Western Europe. The city lights are visible in the early morning hours of August 5, 2020.
The photo was captured by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite. The VIIRS day-night band is capable of detecting photons of light in 22 different wavelengths ranging from green to near-infrared.
William Stefanov is a remote sensing scientist for the International Space Station science office.
“Nighttime imagery provides an intuitively graspable view of our planet,” said Stefanov. “City lights provide a fairly straightforward means to map urban versus rural areas, and to show where the major population centers are and where they are not. They are also an excellent means to track urban and suburban growth, which feeds into planning for energy use and urban hazards, for studying urban heat islands, and for initializing climate models.” Also The city lights of Western Europe as shown in the images are stunning.
Only after the beginning of the foreign conquests of the Age of Discovery, the autonomous discourse of “Europe” as “the West” began to protractedly detach itself from the unifying narrative of “Christendom“, the hitherto dominant identity system in the area, in which was until then subsumed. Later in time, the concept of “Eastern Europe” was created during the Age of Enlightenment to consolidate and purify the concept of “Western Europe”Prior to the Roman conquest, a large part of Western Europe had adopted the newly developed La Tène culture. As the Roman domain expanded.
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By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Staff Writer
Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory
