The blackout, from space

[mattlistener]

How it didn't look:



This is a portion of the famous earth-at-night composite photo from a couple years ago, with a black triangle drawn on.


How it did look:




Amusingly, in my googling for the fake image, I found one news page that quoted it in a story, caught in google's cache!

Cached story: A really long href.
Current page: http://www.american-partisan.com/cols/2003/king/qtr3/0822.htm

(The google-cached page relies on the news site's hosting of the image, which I imagine they'll take down eventually.)

Comments

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

That is really cool!

I love fake images that end up getting forwarded. It's fascinating what they say about people's impression of an event. My impression of the blackout was that it effected the North East, and oh yeah, that place in between the two coasts. Looking at the two images, I've learned that in fact the Midwest was harder hit -- they are far darker than the East Coast at 9:14pm. I guess that is because the lights started coming on in NYC and/or NYC has more areas where there might have been backup generators?

One small detail though... because the link is so long, it is making my friends view hard to read. Could you hide it behind an a href?

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

>One small detail though... because the link is so long, it is making my friends view hard to read. Could you hide it behind an a href?

I'm on my own friends list, and I was just now scanning to figure out who the current culprit was. Oops!

Thanks for the vote of coolness! I enjoy doing stuff like that.

[dalek.livejournal.com]

I'd imagine that the lights you do see are the non-grid lights, backup lights, cars, etc.

So of course New York City will have more than Toronto or Detroit.

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

That's a good point! I didn't think about the cars.

But on the other hand, IIRC, parts of NYC were getting their lights on block by block around 9pm. I may be recalling wrong.

[zmook.livejournal.com]

I agree, the most striking thing is how Toronto, Cleveland and Columbus just disappear. Where are the real images from?

[mattlistener.livejournal.com]

earthobservatory.nasa.gov