Astronauts on the International Space Station took this picture of Florida—the peninsula being highly recognizable even at night—especially when looking roughly north, as our map-trained brain expects. The brightest continuous patch of lights is the Miami narrow metropolitan area bordering the Atlantic Ocean—the second largest metropolitan area in the southeastern United States (after New York) with 5.56 million people. Illuminated areas give a strong sense of the size of cities: the next largest metropolitan area in the view is that of the Tampa Bay region on the opposite side of the peninsula, with 4.3 million people. Orlando, located in the middle of the peninsula, occupies a visibly smaller area reflecting a smaller population (Greater Orlando has 2.3 million people). The straight line of visible cities along the east coast stretches 560 kilometres (350 miles) from Jacksonville all the way to Wilmington in North Carolina, near Cape Hatteras.
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South of Orlando, the centre and southern portions of the peninsula are as dark as the Atlantic Ocean, vividly illustrating the almost population-free Everglades wetland. The lights of Cocoa Beach trace out the curved lines of Cape Canaveral, where NASA launches its space missions, that lies immediately south of the Kennedy Space Center. Dim lights of the Florida Keys extend the arc of the Atlantic coast to the corner of the image. The small cluster of lights far offshore is Freeport on Grand Bahama Island (on the right). Clouds lit by the moon glow as faint blue areas throughout the image.
Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA-Johnson Space Center. "The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth."
2014-10-13 06:19:37
<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/scripts/sseop/photo.pl?mission=ISS041&amp;roll=E&amp;frame=74232">The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (NASA Crew Earth Observations)</a>