What Does This NASA Photo of India Really Portray?

It started on Facebook, then quickly went viral: This photograph of India at night, shot from space and composited by NASA, has been widely described as portraying the subcontinent during Diwali. The Diwali festival or "festival of lights" is an important Hindu holiday; the name stems from Deepavali or "row of lamps."

The photo is an overlay of shots highlighting India's burgeoning population over several years. The white lights were the only illumination visible before 1992. The blue lights appeared in 1992. The green lights in 1998. And the red lights appeared in 2003.

What's not clear is that the explanation claims the white lights "were the only illumination visible before 1992" and that the colored lights appeared in subsequent years. If this photograph is to highlight population growth, doesn't it make sense that perhaps NASA changed the color of the new lights appearing in '92, '98 and '03 to provide overlays as a visual marker of growth?

If this photo is what the viralists originally claimed, it implies that different regions of India coordinated with one another to celebrate Diwali with dedicated colors for their regions. And it doesn't explain why Myanmar, which as far as I know does not celebrate the festival, is off to the right with a bunch of red lights.

I'm not familiar enough with Diwali and how it is celebrated in India to determine if this makes sense. Anyone with more experience care to sound off?

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15 Comments

I am an Indian analyst and I can add some perspective to this post. To describe it simply, in essence, Diwali can be looked at as a combination of Christmas, 4th of July and Thanksgiving, in addition to a host of Indian traditions around food, family, friends and goodwill.

While families that celebrate Diwali light a lot of firecrackers, the timing cannot be assumed to be coincident to the timing of this picture. In addition, it is highly unlikely that entire cities and towns would have been lighting firecrackers of the same color (blue/red, etc.), much less cities adjacent to each other, at the time of this picture. Hence, I can conclude that this picture has nothing to do with firecracker colors.

Now, coming to the hypothesis around population growth. The most populous states in India are what you see as the northern blue area in the picture and the unlit part under it, primarily because of how backward these states are compared to the rest of the country, in terms of family planning and education. So, the lights cannot refer to the population explosion. The white lights correspond to the more developed, industrialized and higher per capita income areas of the country (even though parts of them are agriculture-driven). Based on my experience and the order of the different colors showing up on the map, I would propose that they signify factors such as industrialization and per capita income, where the size of the marker correlates to the degree of prosperity. In other words, the more well-lit the area, the more prosperous it is.

@Rashmi: The Vedas encourage everyone to keep questioning the logic behind everything. If you don't question the logic behind what you are doing, you are likely to fall into the trap of being superstitious instead of being religious.

This photograph of India at night has been widely described as, shot from space and composite by NASA portraying the subcontinent during Diwali.
However, its not true. The fact is that image was composite by Earth Observation Group (NOAA) for "Monitoring forest fires over the Indian region using Defense Meteorological Satellite Program-Operational Line-scan System nighttime satellite data" .

This is definitely not Diwali. Mostly what Ken K said previously is correct. But it does not really indicate population growth either. What it does indicate is previously economically backward regions experienced enough economic advancement so as to be able to afford enough (white colored) electric lights as to be visible from space. People lived in those areas before but survived using small oil or kerosine lamps because there was no electricity. The area with the highest concentration of red is the state of Orissa a backward place that is slowly growing.

I am an Indian analyst and I can add some perspective to
this post. To describe it simply, in essence, Diwali can be looked at as a
combination of Christmas, 4th of July and Thanksgiving, in addition
to a host of Indian traditions around food, family, friends and goodwill. While
families that celebrate Diwali light a lot of firecrackers, the timing cannot
be assumed to be coincident to the timing of this picture. In addition, it is
highly unlikely that entire cities and towns would have been lighting firecrackers
of the same color (blue/red, etc.), much less cities adjacent to each other, at
the time of this picture. Hence, I can conclude that this picture has nothing
to do with firecracker colors.

Now, coming to the hypothesis around population growth. The
most populous states in India are what you see as the northern blue area in the
picture and the unlit part under it, primarily because of how backward these states
are compared to the rest of the country, in terms of family planning and education.
So, the lights cannot refer to the population explosion.

The white lights correspond to the more developed, industrialized
and higher per capita income areas of the country (even though parts of them
are agriculture-driven). Based on my experience and the order of the different
colors showing up on the map, I would propose that they signify factors such as
industrialization and per capita income, where the size of the marker
correlates to the degree of prosperity. In other words, the more well-lit the
area, the more prosperous it is.

@Rashmi: The Vedas encourage everyone to keep questioning
the logic behind everything. If you don’t question the logic behind what you
are doing, you are likely to fall into the trap of being superstitious instead
of being religious.

Scientists have their own strange way of creating shorthand sentences, and so do mapping specialists. Remember all those false-color pictures of the cosmos that NASA creates? This is almost certainly similar. Those aren't lights, despite the sentence wording -- those are colored dots. They represent lighting, as seen at night from high up, at 4 different times.
Think of it as a design problem: How, on a single map, would you show the changes in lighting visible at night at 4 different time points in history? The most sensible way is to use 4 layers and colorize the different layers. That way you can see exactly where the changes occur. It is an elegant, easily understood, data-dense display of very complex information.
And then some internet cretins came along and declared that the colors are really like that on the ground. Morons are everywhere.
I assume the wording should have been this, in order to be understood by us outsiders (outside the project):
The photo is an overlay of shots of night lighting visible from space, highlighting India's burgeoning population over several years. The white color indicates night-time illumination visible before 1992. The blue color indicates (white) lighting that first appeared in 1992. The green color indicates lights that first appeared in 1998. And the red color indicates lights that first appeared in 2003.

The image is most certainly not of Diwali. For one, the idea of different regions celebrating with different colored lights is ridiculous. Some people have claimed that the colors are because of the fireworks that fill the sky on Diwali night. But that doesn't explain why the illumination is brightest along the Indus river in predominantly muslim Pakistan--Diwali is a hindu festival.

This probably represents Economic growth, not population growth. The areas that are dark (Bihar, North Eastern states) are the areas in India which are comparatively backward in terms of economic growth, whereas the brightest lights are in the metropolis'. The areas that are dark also represent a very large part of the population, so the population growth theory doesn't make any sense. I'm not sure about the varying colors, but that seems like the most logical explanation.

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