In the serendipity that is online searching, we found this high-definition video taken and processed by divisions of NASA. It’s a fascinating alternate way to think about data visualization. The video shows light, but the light is also a proxy or approximation of electricity. What do the data show you?

NASA writes on its Flickr caption for this video:

This view of Earth at night is a cloud-free view from space as acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership Satellite (Suomi NPP). A joint program by NASA and NOAA, Suomi NPP captured this nighttime image by the satellite’s Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The day-night band on VIIRS detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, gas flares, and wildfires. This new image is a composite of data acquired over nine days in April and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 satellite orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of land surface.

This video uses the Earth at night view created by NASA’s Earth Observatory with data processed by NOAA’s National Geophysical Data Center and combined with a version of the Earth Observatory’s Blue Marble: Next Generation.

Image: Screenshot from “Earth at Night, North America” by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio / Earth Observatory on Flickr. CC-BY-2.0.