Black Marble – Wrexham At Night

One of the most viewed stories world wide today has been the release of the ‘Black Marble’ images from NASA. It shows images of the earth at night, collected and created from numerous pictures without any cloud or bad weather via the Suomi spacecraft.

The images were collected over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits and 2.5 terabytes of data to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands.

General earth wide images have appeared in the media, as have UK only ones, but here we reproduce the highest resolution ones possible for Wrexham, Wales and the surrounding area. This was created by the simple, in theory, process of cropping a big image. With the image in question being half a gigabyte large, it took a little more time than we planned!

Named for satellite meteorology pioneer Verner Suomi, the spacecraft flies over any given point on Earth’s surface twice each day at around 824 kilometers (512 miles) above the surface in a polar orbit, circling the planet about 14 times a day. Suomi NPP sends its data once per orbit to a ground station in Svalbard, Norway, and continuously to local direct broadcast users distributed around the world.

You can read more about this on the NASA site by clicking here.

Keep an eye on Wrexham.com over the coming weeks as we will be turning our eyes skywards again, as there is a cracking meteor shower due again!