Followup: City lights from space

Last week, I posted a picture taken by International Space Station astronaut Ron Garan, showing city lights at night. I was curious about what the cities were, and initially had a hard time figuring it out. But, using various tools — Wolfram Alpha to get the ISS position at the time the photo was taken, an atlas, and a rough direction and scale using the visibility of Orion’s belt in the picture — I took a stab at which cities were which.

A followup on that post is in order. A lot of people left comments on the post, and some went through similar sleuthing exercises as I did. Quite a few agree with my assessment: the city in the center of the picture is Warsaw, Poland. Berlin is on the horizon, and other cities are as I determined.

I used an old-fashioned atlas to find the cities because I couldn’t find a good piece of software to do it. But then I had a facepalmy moment when several people suggested Google Earth! I got a new computer when my Mac died a little while ...

Full story at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/18/followup-city-lights-from-space/