SPACE, the final frontier — It’s recognizable even at night.
Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of Florida in October 2014.
From the lights alone, you have a strong sense of the size of cities.
The brightest continuous patch of lights is Miami-Fort Lauderdale, the largest urban area in the southeastern U.S. and home to 5.6 million people.
The next largest area is the Tampa Bay area (2.8 million people) on the Gulf Coast.
Orlando, which is in the middle, has a smaller footprint with 2.3 million people.
A nearly straight line of cities runs nearly 350 miles along the Atlantic coast from Jacksonville, Florida, to Wilmington, North Carolina.
South of Orlando, the center and southern portions of the peninsula are as dark as the Atlantic Ocean. That’s the almost population-free Everglades wetland.
The lights of Cocoa Beach trace the curved lines of Cape Canaveral and 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 (image right). The faint blue areas throughout the image are clouds lit by moonlight.
For more information on the image, go to NASA.gov.
WFTV
