Vue de la Terre depuis l'ISS

Why can't we see any city lights when the ISS is on the dark side of the Earth?

The High Definition Earth Viewing (HDEV) experiment places four commercially available HD cameras on the exterior of the space station and uses them to stream live video of Earth for viewing online.
(...) No adjustment of the settings on the cameras is available, and they are tuned to viewing the Earth while the surface is illuminated by the sun. On the night side of the Earth, the camera settings cannot be adjusted for night viewing.
Using these cameras, it is not possible to see the city lights at night.

There are other cameras on the ISS which can be adjusted for lower lighting conditions while the ISS is on the night side of the Earth. Many of the astronauts take photos and produce videos using a variety of other cameras.

The night images we see are with cameras that are exposed long enough to capture the light emitted from urban areas and related places with electric light. Just looking at earth at night with human eyes most of the light does not travel the 240 miles up with enough intensity to be easily seen. The night light images are very interesting, and do tell a human settlement story. Also, one can certainly easily see cities while sitting in a plane at 35,000 feet.

With earth images that are enhanced (actual daytime images are a bit washed out and grey, and are altered to get a greater contrast and makes land look greener than it actually is…while night time images have exposures to pick up the light), in a way most of these images are to some extent: fake news…

@Koreus a écrit:
Les photos originales doivent être disponibles sur le site de la NASA.
Je pense qu’il l’indiquerait si elles étaient retouchées