So I’m minding my own business looking at news about Bernie endorsing Hillary, and BOOM — a photo comes across my screen of Paris at night, photographed from the International Space Station. Check this out:
From the ISS page on this photo:
Around local midnight time on April 8, 2015, astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of Paris, often referred to as the “City of Light.”
The pattern of the street grid dominates at night, providing a completely different set of visual features from those visible during the day. For instance, the winding Seine River is a main visual cue by day, but here the thin black line of the river is hard to detect until you focus on the strong meanders and the street lights on both banks.
The brightest boulevard in the dense network of streets is the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the historical axis of the city, as designed in the 17th century. Every year on Bastille Day (July 14), the largest military parade in Europe processes down the Champs Élysées, reviewed by the President of the Republic. This grand avenue joins the royal Palace of the Tuileries–whose gardens appear as a dark rectangle on the river–to the star-like meeting place of eleven major boulevards at the Arc de Triomphe.
The many forested parks of Paris stand out as black polygons–such as the Bois de Boulogne and Vincennes. Orly and Charles de Gaulle airports are distinguished by their very bright lights next to the dark areas of runways and surrounding open land. Paris’s great ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique, encloses the city center.
Astronaut photograph ISS043-E-93480 was acquired on April 8, 2015, with a Nikon D4 digital camera using a 400 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center.
If you want to see an enormous 4,000+ pixel photo of this view… here’s that 4,000+ pixel photo of that ISS view of Paris at night.
Also, from the photo detail page of this shot – NASA:
Near midnight astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this image of Paris. The city is strongly patterned by the street grid because streets are the most consistently lit lines at night, providing a completely different set of features from those seen during the day. A day image shows the winding Seine River is the main visual cue, but here the thin black line of the river is hard to detect, until you focus on the strong meanders that wind across the image from lower left to top right. When you know what to look for you can see street lights on both banks following the course of the river, especially near the city center.
The many forested parks of Paris stand out as black polygons such as the Bois de Boulogne (at image lower center) and Vincennes (at image upper center). Even the lit paths through the Bois de Boulogne can be seen clearly in this image. Airports show a combination of very bright lights and the dark areas of runways and surrounding open country. A small part of the Charles de Gaulle airport appears at image top left, and Orly airport at image top right near the Seine.
Paris’s great ring road, the Boulevard Périphérique, encloses the city center, touching both of the abovementioned parks. The brightest boulevard in the dense network of streets in the center, is the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, the historical axis of the city designed in the 17th century. Every year on Bastille Day (14 July), the largest military parade in Europe processes down the Champs-Élysées, reviewed by the President of the Republic. The Champs Élysées, joins the royal Palace of the Tuileries, whose gardens appear as a dark rectangle on the river, to the star-like meeting place of eleven major arterial boulevards at the Arc de Triomphe at image center. This famous plaza was long named the Étoile (star).
Space is cool.
