WTF, NASA?

[reynardo]

Who has seen the image of the Earth from space, at night? The latest edition is here.

Here's a clipping I've just made, of Australia.



Click on it or here for the really weird bit.

Here's the bigger picture.

There's no-one in the centre of Australia. That is - there's almost no-one. According to Wikipedia, almost 75% of all Australians live in the cities or coastal areas.

That ain't the big lit-up bit on the left.

NASA are claiming it's wildfires, but here's a look at the area or somewhere similar:



You'd have a lot of trouble getting that lot to stay alight, let alone to show the sort of light that's in the photo.

So...

Did NASA make a boo boo of epic proportions (to us, anyway), or is that where the secret Boat People camps are, or is it a US Military secret like 100 Pine Gaps except bigger?

Comments

[turnberryknkn.livejournal.com]

The detailed answer I think is pretty cool. The whole image was pieced together from many smaller images obtained over successive nights, as the satellite made progressively shifting sweeps over the planet. A particular block of land would be imaged one night, the block geographically next to it on a different pass a little later, etc. As a particular fire burned its way across the land, the same fire would get pictured again and again, as it moved from its old block on one day into a new block being imaged the next day. In essence, what we're seeing in each bright squiggle, is the whole area burned by a single wildfire across the 9 days in April or the 13 days in October, assembled from night after night of reimaging where each fire was now.

Reality: often as cool as any conspiracy theory. :-)

[reynardo.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid that makes no sense - look at the scenery, There really isn't enough scrub to give that much light unless you also enhanced every pic to exaggerate the fire light. Even the Black Saturday fires, with 100m high flames in thick scrub, didn't give that much light.