24 | NewScientist | 00 Month 2012

24 | NewScientist | 31 March 2012

Aperture

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00 Month 2012 | NewScientist | 25

31 March 2012 | NewScientist | 25

Cities that never sleepNEW YORK may be the city most famous for never turning out the lights, but as this image of the eastern US taken from the International Space Station shows, when the sun goes down the Big Apple is far from alone.

Stretching out from New York City – the brightest hub of light in the lower right – is Long Island, which formed when the great ice sheets of North America began to melt and dumped their sediments as the last glacial maximum waned 20,000 years ago. Today, the brightly lit western end of the island is home to Brooklyn and Queens, while its darker eastern tip is still dotted with farmland and fishing villages.

Connecting the big east-coast cities is a long tendril of light – Interstate 95. This roadway runs over 3000 kilometres from Miami, Florida, to the Canadian border. Heading south (left in the image) from New York, the road snakes through the east’s great urban centres – first Philadelphia, then Baltimore and on to Washington DC.

Also visible in the photo are two Russian Progress modules, delivered uncrewed to the ISS by Soyuz rockets. They carried a range of equipment and consumables to the astronauts on board: fuel, food, air, water, oxygen, and other bits and bobs such as scientific and photographic equipment. They will remain docked to the ISS until the next supply module arrives, when they will be filled with waste and released, to burn up in the atmosphere. Michael Reilly

Photographer NASA

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