The photo above shows Europe at Night.
The lights show just how densely populated the vast majority of Europe really is.
Monaco is the most densely populated country in Europe with 18,369 people per square km. But even non-micro states have extremely high population densities such as Malta with 1,260 people per square km, Netherlands with 393, Belgium with 337, UK with 269 or Germany with 233 people per square km.
To put those numbers into perspective, if the US was as densely populated as the Netherlands it would have a population of around 3.8 billion people, over ten times more than it has today.
You can find similar photos of Earth from space in the following books:
- Earth from Space
- Earth and Space: Photographs from the Archives of NASA
- Earth From Space: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
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Korakys says
That’s a ton of light in the North Sea. Oil rigs I presume.
Mark Smith says
What this also shows is the tremendous leakage of artificial light in a direction that helps nobody and harms astronomers – outward.
Imagine if we directed this lost light downward toward the city streets it is mostly supposed to illuminate. We could cut our energy expenditures on general lighting very significantly.
Some cities are now requiring street lights to be designed to direct certain minimum fractions of their light downward. I think this is a good idea, and support it.
Fernando Hardcastle says
While harming astronomers sucks (I dabble in it myself) that is a minor problem – the real problem is all that energy wasted, directed to the sky and space. It’s a shame we cannot direct more towards the objects being illuminated and decrease overall energy use.