You can’t literally see lights from space or whatever. If somewhere had less coverage on google maps you wouldn’t think it’s uninhabited, but for some reason, people irl seem to be constantly referring to this image as though it’s a literal picture. Mostly for ‘civilized’ reasons, but also light pollution and just other stuff. Maybe this just made the rounds on reddit or something?

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      131·
      10 days ago

      Those are taken with an 8-20 second shutter speed which takes in considerably more light. In some cases they actually take several dozen photos in the same spot then stitch them together as one picture, this brings out light considerably more than it is visible usually.

      Here’s live video, you will see little to no light: https://youtu.be/DfEr5XCFNWM

      • Esoteir [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        13·
        10 days ago

        that’s more bc of the poor quality the ISS main cam is versus the new EHDC camera, you can see lights at night on the higher res livestream camera

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
          2·
          10 days ago

          Yes but this is still a tiny amount of light compared to the composite images and slow shutter speed images intended to capture light. It’s the same technique as photographing epic pictures of stars and galaxies in the night sky.

          • Esoteir [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            10 days ago

            okay but i was replying to OP saying you literally can’t see them from space and you can?

            you could use the same argument about the aurora borealis, just because it’s darker in person doesn’t mean you can’t see it

              • Esoteir [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                1·
                10 days ago

                it’s all good, i think i took your reply in the wrong way, so i’m sorry about that. I was replying to OP saying you can’t see the lights from space, so I took the correction as an “um, actually you can’t, you can only really see them in a camera picture”, where after rereading, I think you were more responding to me responding to OP’s entire post and saying that it would only look like the same brightness as the composite image with the high shutter speeds getting an exposure probably higher than the human eye could get, which is a fair assumption

                that being said i just looked at the first ISS picture I posted again and you can see the metadata, which has it at a shutter speed of one second so shrug-outta-hecks