# City Lights of the United States 2012

- By: NASA Earth Observatory
- Date: 2012-12-05
- Classification: Photograph
- Credit line: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=79800 for GeoTIFF original file. https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/8247975848/in/set-72157632172101342/ for quicker access to the jpeg
- Museum: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:City_Lights_of_the_United_States_2012.jpg)
- Rights: Public domain
- Picture: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/City_Lights_of_the_United_States_2012.jpg/1920px-City_Lights_of_the_United_States_2012.jpg
- Who can see it: Kids profiles and older (museums give no ratings; placed by Invisible Network from the museum's own words)

NASA image acquired April 18 - October 23, 2012

This image of the United States of America at night is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi NPP satellite in April and October 2012. The image was made possible by the new satellite’s “day-night band” of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe dim signals such as city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires, and reflected moonlight.

Instrument: Suomi NPP - VIIRS

Projection: Albers equal-area conic, WGS84 datum, standard parallels 29.5°N and 44.5°N, central meridian 96°W, origin latitude 23°N

On this image one pixel is (737.19 × 737.19)m²