Cities at Night Panorama of Millions of US East Coast Earthlings

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Do you live here?

Tens of millions of Earthlings live and work in the bustling and seemingly intertwined American mega-metropolis of the Philadelphia-New York City-Boston corridor (bottom-center splotch) captured in this stunning “Cities at Night” panorama of the East Coast of the United States along the Atlantic seaboard (image above).

Look northward and you’ll see the home to millions more Earthlings inhabiting the brilliantly lit Canadian cities of Toronto (launch site for “Lego Man in Space“) and Montreal to the west of Lake Ontario (dark oval at left-center).

The gorgeous panorama showing a portion of the Earth at Night and the atmospheric limb and light activity from the Aurora Borealis was snapped by the Expedition 30 crew living and working aboard the million pound International Space Station (ISS) on Jan. 29.

Lately, the 6 man international crew of Expedition 30 from Russia, Holland and the US have been on a roll taking one after another magnificent Nighttime pictures of our Home Planet, Auroras’ and celestial wonders like Comet Lovejoy.

Be sure to take a comparative look at the recent panorama of Western Europe at Night snapped by the ISS crew a week before on Jan 22 – here.

To test your geography smarts, here’s a map of the US East Coast highlighting much of what’s visible in the ISS panorama.

This Earthling has lived in cities on the US East Coast and Western Europe – images above and below

Western Europe at Night
European ‘Cities at Night’ from the ISS with station solar arrays and robotic hand in foreground. Credit: NASA

Two years ago in Feb. 2010, the US East Coast was struck by “Snowmageddon”, and this is how we looked from space

Meanwhile, two of the Expedition 30 crew members, Russian Flight Engineers Oleg Kononenko and Anton Shkaplerov, are preparing for a spacewalk on Friday, Feb. 16. They will be installing equipment outside the ISS on the Russian Pirs, Poisk and Zvezda modules.

Ken Kremer

Dr. Ken Kremer is a speaker, research scientist, freelance science journalist (KSC area,FL) and photographer whose articles, space exploration images and Mars mosaics have appeared in magazines, books, websites and calendars including Astronomy Picture of the Day, NBC, FOX, BBC, SPACE.com, Spaceflight Now, Science and the covers of Aviation Week & Space Technology, Spaceflight and the Explorers Club magazines. Ken has presented at numerous educational institutions, civic & religious organizations, museums and astronomy clubs. Ken has reported first hand from the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, NASA Wallops, NASA Michoud/Stennis/Langley and on over 80 launches including 8 shuttle launches. He lectures on both Human and Robotic spaceflight - www.kenkremer.com. Follow Ken on Facebook and Twitter

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