One of my projects while at National Geographic Maps was creating an “Earth at Night” art side for the 2004 World political map supplement for the Magazine. I used a gridded 1-km resolution product from NASA and NOAA via the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program satellites to accomplish this and the result was beautiful and I often see the poster displayed around town.
The International Space Station “expedition 6″ astronauts have developed a new product by photographing out the station’s windows over hundreds of nights. Full color between 10 and 60 meter resolution. A barn-door tracker mounted camera helps cancel the orbital movement which would otherwise make the images blurry.
They have produced a video highlighting this new dataset with commentary featuring many world cities.
View video (will open large file in new window, be prepared for wait.)
I include their full blog post on that below. Thanks Pat!