VIDEO: Christmas Lights Visable From Outer Space

By  //  December 25, 2014

nasa's new insights into energy consumption

ABOVE VIDEO: It’s official, our holiday lights are so bright we can see them from space. Thanks to the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite, a joint mission between NASA and NOAA, scientists are presenting a new way of studying satellite data that can illustrate patterns in holiday lights, both during Christmas and the Holy Month of Ramadan.

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These new tools can provide new insights into how energy consumption behaviors vary across different cultural settings.

A note about the data: Because snow reflects so much light, the researchers could only analyze snow-free cities.

They focused on the U.S. West Coast from San Francisco and Los Angeles, and cities south of a rough imaginary line from St. Louis to Washington, D.C.