Earth at Night

This is what the Earth looks like at night.
Surprisingly, city lights makes the task finding a particular city or country quite possible. Human-made lights highlights particularly developed or populated areas of the Earth's surface, including the seaboards of Europe, the eastern United States and Japan.
Many large cities are located near rivers or oceans so that they can exchange goods cheaply by boat.
Particularly dark areas include the central parts of South America, Africa, Asia and Australia. The above images is actually a composite of hundreds of pictures made by the orbiting DMSP satellites.