Turns out, it is a river in Egypt

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/11/08/turns-out-it-is-a-river-in-egypt/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BadAstronomyBlog+%28Bad+Astronomy%29

by chanux • 16 years ago

167 42 16 years ago

blogs.discovermagazine.com

KevinMS• 16 years ago

Back on the ground, most of the land area around the river is dark, of course, because it’s desert.

Maybe I'm weird, but now I want to know what those lonely spots of light are.

throw_away• 16 years ago

from google maps, you can figure out some of the places by comparing them to the satellite image: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...

this seems to be one of the more isolated ones: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bahariya_Oasis

pretty fascinating.

Pyrodogg• 16 years ago

Thats what I was thinking. The few places in the desert that people found water.

mgunes• 16 years ago

> Maybe I'm weird, but now I want to know what those lonely spots of light are.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5Pu_42cHz4#t=02m48s

shivam14• 16 years ago

Looking at a composite night picture of the world, another river with a heavy relative concentration seems to be the Indus in Pakistan. http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/earthlights2_dmsp_big.j...

In general, the picture provides a great insight into both the affluence and population density of various parts of the world.

eru3• 16 years ago

That picture is now ten years old. I wonder how affluence and population density have changed since then.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

One of the great ones is looking at the Trans-Siberian Railroad. It's like the man-made version of a river (that's not a canal). It's just this string of humanity reaching across Asian.

As for the sister comment, I believe China would be twice of bright, and the lights likely extending all the way to the edge of the deserts/mountains.

simonw2• 16 years ago

I'm in Egypt at the moment. We're in Dahab, on the Sinai peninsular - but we spent several weeks travelling on the Nile from Cairo to Aswan and Luxor before we got here.

The experience that really brought home the importance of the Nile was taking the overnight train from Cairo to Aswan. You wake up in the morning to sunrise over the Nile. If you look out of the left hand window of the train, you see desert - nothing but sand and rocks. If you look out of the right hand window, you see literally just a few hundred metres of lush green farmland followed by the expanse of the river. It makes you realise that a large chunk of Egypt's usable land is hundreds of miles long but less than half a mile wide.

pmcginn• 16 years ago

I spent a month in Egypt when I was much younger.

Nothing drives home the beauty, the fragility, and somehow the hospitality of the country like this image.

I didn't get to see Luxor or Aswan (it was out of season), and I missed Alex because I ran out of money. The time I spent in Cairo, Sharm, Giza, Ainh-Soknah, and 6th of October City changed my life.

To anyone considering it: if you have the chance to travel, do it. Nothing makes the world seem smaller and the people seem closer.

simonw2• 16 years ago

Here's a video my wife took that illustrates the point: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliedowne/5120992880/

demallien• 16 years ago

Great video. I find it depressing that they couldn't think of anything better to do with that fertile land than to put a highway along the middle of it.

From Luxor onwards the fertile band is substantially wider, more like 20km, as can be seen on Google Maps.

http://maps.google.fr/?ie=UTF8&ll=29.61167,31.330261&...

Does anyone know why the desert of North Africa is so... desert? - In Australia, even the deserts, which are supposed to be some of the driest in the world, in terms of rainfall, have far more vegetation. See here for an example:

http://maps.google.fr/?ie=UTF8&ll=-21.002351,124.804816&...

arethuza• 16 years ago

I was in Kenya a couple of weeks ago and the flight we took flew south from Luxor in Egypt - what stunned me is how empty that region is - literally nothing but sand and rock for hour upon hour with the thin sliver of the Nile running through it.

tienshiao• 16 years ago

I just returned from a very similar tour (Cairo to Aswan to Luxor, skipped Dahab), probably one week before you. The tour was in Dahab last week. Maybe we crossed paths as our group was leaving and your group was coming.

I took the hot air ballon option in the Valley of the Kings, and from the basket you could see the Nile. Turn a little bit, and you see the farmlands, and turn some more you would see the desert.

At a wide angle, I was able to take a picture of all three in one shot. The Nile is truly the lifeblood of the region.

paulgerhardt• 16 years ago

Anyone know what this article meant by "enphaoronate"?

gojomo2• 16 years ago

Pretty sure it's just a goof trying to make a word that sounds like it means 'enlarge' with 'pharoah' in it. The tone of the article sounds like the author may have been a little loopy on some 'medicine' when writing.

Sure, space travel will pay for itself by engendering international love. Um, ok.

KoZeN• 16 years ago

Did you mean: define: pharaonic

No definitions were found for enphaoronate.

wlievens• 16 years ago

When linking pictures, Phil Plait always adds a line that basically means "Click to enlarge". He started using the Simpsons phrase embiggen at some point, and a while after that he started making up words vaguely related to the context.

Pharaos are big in a metaphorical sense. Enpharaoronate means embiggen.

mohamedsa• 16 years ago

> Pharaos are big in a metaphorical sense.

Incidentally, I've heard that 'Pharaoh' comes from an ancient Egyptian word meaning 'big house' or 'big palace'.

Another speculation is that it's related to the Arabic word فارع, meaning 'very tall'. So it's might be nearer than expected to the intended meaning :)

If 'Enpharaoronate' were a real word it would fit very well in translating a famous Egyptian proverb from Arabic: "Said to the Pharaoh: what Enpharaoronated you? He said: I didn't find anyone to stop me."

gojomo2• 16 years ago

Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders.

There are some borders you can see from space, such as the transition between North and South Korea:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/dprk/dprk-dark....

nhebb2• 16 years ago

Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders.

I don't know why the author thought that was so profound. Did he really expect the borders to be outlined with lights?

mapleoin• 16 years ago

I think this paragraph should shed a bit more light on what the author meant:

But if enough people can get to space, they’ll see the planet for what it is: a fragile, magnificent ball with a thin shell of atmosphere protecting it from the entire Universe… and no artificial boundary lines to be seen. We made those ourselves, and we put an awful lot of stock in them. Remembering that fact might also be an important way to make sure our species endures.

bendtheblock• 16 years ago

It's profound because it's a reframing - we lose assumptions by viewing the Earth from Space.

oiuytgfyhujik• 16 years ago

There is a whole-earth poster like this and some borders are very obvious.

Rich countries have street lighting, poor countries didn't - even the west-east German border used to be very obvious. 20 years later cheap fluorescent tubes are everywhere which has blurred this a little

nlwhittemore• 16 years ago

Pretty amazing. On the books, Cairo has 11 million people. Most people think its closer to 20, and that, day to day, another 20 or so come in from outside for work. I lived there on and off for a few years, and it's truly one of the most remarkable places in the world.

eru3• 16 years ago

Day to day only 20 people on average and net come to Cairo? That would be just 7300 a year and nothing to write home about. (I guess it's more than that. By comparison, Istanbul grew by around a million people a year for a very short time in the 90s.)

kloncks3• 16 years ago

Pretty sure the author of the comment meant 20 million

alexyoung• 16 years ago

The airglow in that photo is beautiful, I don't think I've ever seen that effect appear in such a way before.

shawndumas• 16 years ago

’enphaoronate’?! Embiggen; I say. Is enphaoronate cromulent?

kloncks3• 16 years ago

I'm Egyptian. One of my absolutely favorite parts of Egypt is Nuweba (North of Dahab, South of Taba) in the Sinai.

You stand in the Gulf of Aqaba and just a few hundred meters in front of you is the coast of Saudi Arabia. To the Northeast, you can have a glimpse at the port cities of Eilat in Israel and Aqaba in Jordan.

I've never been in a place with so many countries right next to each other. The profound thing, like the author mentions, is that there's absolutely nothing in that nature dictating or talking about any borders.

From that perspective, all those lands look pretty much the same: gorgeous.

ronnier• 16 years ago

I've been in the same situation, but a different perspective.

In Eilat, viewing Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

kloncks3• 16 years ago

It's sad that to this day not enough Israelis/Egyptians take advantage of the peace accords provisions and travel to the other country.

Little known fact: Israelis can enter the Sinai with just personal id and no visa. Same goes for Egyptians in specific parts of Israel.

Not enough people cross over, due to the "borders" that we put up.

tjic• 16 years ago

> Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders.

Except, some country borders are phenomenally obvious from space - those that separate totalitarian / communist countries from free market / democratic countries.

Look at the border between Israel and Syria.

Look at the border between North Korea and South Korea.

Look at older pictures of the border between East Germany and West Germany.

Capitalism lets people grow, innovate, and develop. Authoritarian governments stifle that.

Thus, in pictures from space, capitalist countries are well lit (if at night), or covered in crops (during the day), and countries with large governments are dark (at night) and barren (during the day).

VladRussian• 16 years ago

"Many astronauts come back from long-durations stays on the ISS with a deep new sense of citizenship not of just their country, but of their planet."

watched "Independence Day" yesterday again. I don't think there is another way short of that to make majority of human species on Earth to feel as "citizens of planet". Things like ecology/green movement doesn't seem to be a way to do it as it is subject to tragedy of commons... at least until it will be out weighted by an order of magnitude bigger tragedy

Turns out, it is a river in Egypt

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