Researchers with the Black Marble project said they can tell when people put up their holiday lights — and not just in North Texas.
DALLAS — Ever think your neighbor’s Christmas lights are so bright they can be seen from outer space?
What about this setup in North Texas that police had to be called to because of all the onlookers?
Well, it turns out the lights from these displays really do stretch into the galaxy.
NASA researchers said their teams can tell the difference from November to December because of the variation in illumination caused by Christmas light displays.
“From the satellite data, you can easily figure out where they are,” Zhuosen Wang, with NASA’s Black Marble project, said.
It turns out it’s not just Christmas — and not just North Texas. The researchers said they can see holidays celebrated across the globe, from Christmas to Ramadan to Diwali.
“All these holidays have one thing in common,” researcher Ranjay Shrestha said. “People like to put up lights outside.”
Of course, NASA did not set out to spy on your neighbor’s Christmas lights and light-up lawn inflatables. The Black Marble technology is a component of the Suomi National Polar-orbiting partnership satellite and “consists of 22 spectral bands from the ultra-violet to mid-infrared,” NASA explains.
It monitors artificial light at night — to track power outages after natural disasters, migration patterns and electricity access, the researchers said.
“[We] try to understand human behavior through nighttime light,” Shrestha said. “We have tons of satellite sensors that operate during the day, and we learn a lot from those satellites, but we are only just now getting images of Earth at night and there’s so many things we can learn.”
The technology can also “provide new data for tracking wildfires, gas flares, and light pollution, and have numerous socioeconomic uses, such as proxying economic activity, monitoring changes in energy infrastructure in urban areas, and providing data to humanitarian organizations in conflict areas,” NASA explains.