Picturing Earth in a New Light
Maps can show more than just where things are: they can also show how things are changing. New artificial light maps reveal a planet that has reshaped its nights through brightening and dimming patterns.
The maps are based on a recent analysis of NASA’s Black Marble data, which found that instead of a gradual increase in artificial light at night over the course of nearly a decade, the patterns are much more nuanced. The analysis depicts a teetering world of industrial booms and busts, construction and blackouts, as well as more incremental changes, such as policy-driven renovations.
NASA’s Black Marble product uses observations from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sensors on the Suomi-NPP, NOAA-20 and NOAA-21 satellites to produce records of nighttime lights on daily, monthly and annual timescales. The VIIRS day-night band detects nighttime light in a wavelength range from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as city lights, reflected moonlight and the aurora borealis.
The map above shows brightness changes across most of the inhabited world (between 60 degrees south and 70 degrees north). The yellow and gold areas are where there has been the most brightening over the study period, 2014 to 2022, and the purple areas are where there has been the most attenuation.
The visualization below shows the same data for the Eastern Hemisphere. Note that this version includes some artistic touches, such as simulated sunlight and shadows, while the nighttime lights data superimposed on the globe remains based on scientific analysis. The image appeared on the cover of Naturewhere the study was published in April 2026.
Overall, the researchers found that overall brightness increased by 34% during the study period, but that this increase masked large areas of dimming. Such “bidirectional changes” often occur side by side. In the United States, for example, cities on the West Coast became brighter as their populations grew, while much of the East Coast experienced a decline in brightness, which the team attributed to increased use of energy-efficient LEDs and broader economic restructuring.
The authors concluded that internationally, nighttime lighting has increased in China and northern India alongside urban development, while LED and energy-saving measures have coincided with a reduction in light pollution in Paris and across France (33% mitigation), the UK (22% mitigation), and the Netherlands (21% mitigation). European nights softened sharply in 2022 during a regional energy crisis that followed the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Larger versions of the maps on this page can be downloaded below. Animations showing annual changes in nighttime lights throughout the study period are available from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio.
NASA Earth Observatory images by Michala Garrison, using data from Li, T. et al. (2026). Story by Sally Younger adapted for Earth Observatory by Kathryn Hansen.
Eastern Hemisphere: 2014-2022
