Even at school, our imagination was amazed by stories that only the Great Wall of China is visible from space. It turns out that people have created many impressive structures that can be seen from a height of hundreds of kilometers. True, from 400 km - the most high point ISS orbits - man-made structures are not visible without the help of optics, but if you go lower, you can see a lot of interesting things. The orbital altitude of the American shuttles was about 200 km, but numerous satellites fly even lower.
10. Kuibyshev Reservoir
This artificial reservoir with an area of 6.45 thousand km² is the second largest river reservoir in the world. It is also called the Zhiguli Sea. The purpose of the reservoir is irrigation, electricity generation, fisheries development and others. important tasks.
9. Nazca Lines
Presumably, these mysterious geoglyphs were built between 400 and 650 AD. The lines are located in the south of Peru on the Nazca plateau. One hypothesis suggests that these lines are signal lines and are intended for landing alien ships. And therefore, there should be nothing surprising in the fact that they are visible from space.
8. Lake Volta
The world's largest man-made reservoir is located in Africa on the Volta River and has an area of 8.5 thousand km². The lake covers 3.6% of Ghana's area. More than 5.5 million people live on the banks of this reservoir.
7. Name of Sheikh Hamad
The eccentric Arab billionaire sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan erected the inscription “HAMAD” on the private island of Al Futaisi. The height of each letter is 1 km, the length of the inscription is more than 3 km. The first 2 letters represent shipping channels filled with water.
5. Horse Sultan
This earthen sculpture was created from coal slag extracted from a mine in Caerphilly, Wales. Of course, from the ISS it can only be seen using optics, but on satellite images the Sultan is visible very well.
4. Firefox logo
On the fields American state Oregon in 2006 created a circle in the shape of the young logo at the time Firefox browser. The photo with the logo became one of the most popular Google places Earth. Such original advertising really helped attract new users to the browser. ©
3. Great Pyramids of Egypt
The giant tombs of the ancient pharaohs range in height from 138 to 146 meters. Some researchers believe that, like the Nazca Lines, the pyramids are beacons for aliens. Be that as it may, they can be really easily seen from Earth orbit.
2. Palm Jumeirah artificial island
Bulk islands in Dubai are included in many ratings and tops. Palm Jumeirah is the largest man-made island and one of the most expensive structures in the world. The sixteen branches of the palm island and the surrounding mound are clearly visible from orbit.
1. The Great Wall of China
This grandiose building is almost 9,000 km long including branches. Construction of the wall began in the 4th century BC. and continued slowly until 1644. The wall is indeed visible from orbit with the naked eye, but only under ideal weather conditions.
The corpse of a pink rabbit, giant autographs and a Ukrainian trident can be found on Google Maps.
© tochka.netFrom space our Earth looks very beautiful. Sometimes many times better than from the surface. But man leaves more than just landfills and toxic rivers of waste on the Earth.
There are a lot of fun things you can see from a satellite. And thanks modern technologies Everyone can admire the quirks.
We present to you the top 7 funny objects that can be seen from space on our Earth.
Pink bunny corpse
In first place is a giant knitted pink rabbit, which lies in the Italian Alps, near the town of Arestin.
According to legend, the rabbit fell from a great height and crashed; its intestines even fell out of its belly.
This crazy idea comes from a group of Italian artists called Gelatin. They tied a 60-meter rabbit from natural materials, which should decompose by 2025.
Pilgrimages of tourists are annually organized to visit the rabbit, who happily take pictures near the giant “corpse”.
Name of sheikh and leader
In second place in terms of eccentricity is a giant name in the desert. Billionaire Sheikh Hamad bin Hamdan Al Nahyan from Abu Dhabi wrote his name on Futaisi Island.
Huge letters "HAMAD" 1 km high are clearly visible from space. The first two are a shipping canal. The length of the inscription is more than 3 kilometers.
The communist inscription is formed by trees planted by the forestry department Kurgan region near the villages of Trud and Znanie. The composition of trees was made 40 years ago, for the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin. The letters turned out to be 100 meters long and 600 meters wide.
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Ukraine from space
In fourth place is the most patriotic man-made object that can be seen from space.
Resident of the village Ostrynya in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, 90-year-old UPA veteran Anastasy Kozak laid out a trident from white stone, which can be seen on Google Maps. Thus, the UPA fighter decided to honor the memory of his comrades who died for Ukraine.
For several months, the veteran carried stones up the mountain, cut down unnecessary bushes that would block the work from human eyes, and even planted spruce and thuja on the hill. Today he regularly goes to the mountain and waters them.
The location of the coat of arms of Ukraine was chosen unusually well; thanks to the open area, the trident is clearly recognizable both from the air and from the Ivano-Frankivsk-Kyiv highway.
Most advanced
Of course, Facebook could not afford not to be present to the inhabitants of orbit.
At the company's new headquarters in Menlo Park, California, a huge QR code recently appeared on the roof of one of the buildings. The icon in which it is encrypted object page address on Facebook, has an area of 12 square meters.
True, Google hasn’t indexed it yet the new kind roofs of Mark Zuckerberg's company office. On satellite map The Facebook office is still undergoing renovations.
The architects did not choose this form on purpose. It was simply in this way that it was most convenient to place buildings on a small plot of land.
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The public was said to be outraged by the "Nazi" look of the US Navy. The department had to spend a lot of money to rebuild it, but judging by Google Maps screenshots, little has changed.
Forest Defender
The lake-man in Brazil closes our hit parade. A 140-meter man-made lake was created near the town of Iacanga in the state of Sao Paulo.
It represents the figure of a man falling flat on a piece of forest. There is a legend on the Internet that the lake was made specifically to protect the green patch from cutting down.
See what other famous and unusual objects can be seen from space .
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Recently, NASA announced that on July 19, the Cassini probe in orbit around Saturn will photograph the Earth, which at the time of shooting will be at a distance of 1.44 billion kilometers from the device. This is not the first photo shoot of this kind, but the first one that was announced in advance. NASA experts hope that the new image will take pride of place among such famous images of the Earth. Whether this is true or not, time will tell, but for now we can remember the history of photographing our planet from the depths of space.
WITH for a long time people have always wanted to look at our planet from above. The advent of aviation gave humanity the opportunity to rise beyond the clouds, and soon rapid development rocket technology did possible to receive photos from truly cosmic heights. The first photographs from space (if we accept the FAI standard, according to which space begins at an altitude of 100 km above sea level) were taken in 1946 using a captured V-2 rocket.
First attempt at photography earth's surface from satellite was undertaken in 1959. Satellite Explorer-6 I took this wonderful photo.
By the way, after Explorer 6's mission was completed, it still served the American Motherland by becoming a target for testing anti-satellite missiles.
Since then, satellite photography has developed at an incredible pace and now you can find a bunch of images of any part of the earth's surface for every taste. But the vast majority of these photos were taken from low Earth orbit. What does the Earth look like from more distant distances?
Apollo Snapshot
The only people who could see the entire Earth (roughly speaking in one frame) were 24 people from the Apollo crews. We are left with several classic photographs as a legacy from this program.
Here's a photo taken with Apollo 11, where the earth's terminator is clearly visible (and yes, we are not talking about a famous action movie, but about the line dividing the illuminated and unlit parts of the planet).
Photo of the Earth's crescent above the surface of the Moon taken by the crew Apollo 15.
Another Earthrise, this time over the so-called dark side Moons. Photo taken with Apollo 16.
"The Blue Marble"- another iconic photograph taken on December 7, 1972 by the crew of Apollo 17 from a distance of approximately 29 thousand km. from our planet. This was not the first image to show the Earth fully illuminated, but it became one of the most famous. The Apollo 17 astronauts are so far the last people who could observe the Earth from this angle. To mark the 40th anniversary of the photo, NASA remade this photo, stitching together a bunch of frames from different satellites into a single composite image. There is also a Russian analogue, taken from the Electro-M satellite.
When viewed from the surface of the Moon, the Earth is constantly located at the same point in the sky. Since the Apollos landed in equatorial regions, in order to make a patriotic avatar, the astronauts had to get the hang of it.
Moderate distance shots
In addition to the Apollo missions, a number of spacecraft photographed the Earth from a great distance. Here are the most famous of these pictures
A very famous photo Voyager 1, taken on September 18, 1977 from a distance of 11.66 million kilometers from Earth. As far as I know, this was the first image of the Earth and the Moon in one frame.
A similar photo taken by the device Galileo from a distance of 6.2 million kilometers in 1992
Photo taken on July 3, 2003 from the station Mars Express. The distance to Earth is 8 million kilometers.
And here is the most recent, but oddly enough the worst quality image taken by the mission Juno from a distance of 9.66 million kilometers. Just think - either NASA really saved money on cameras, or because of the financial crisis, all the employees responsible for Photoshop were fired.
Pictures from Martian orbit
This is what Earth and Jupiter looked like from Mars orbit. The pictures were taken on May 8, 2003 by the device Mars Global Surveyor, located at that time at a distance of 139 million kilometers from Earth. It is worth noting that the camera on board the device could not take color images and these were pictures in artificial colors.
Scheme of the location of Mars and the planets at the time of shooting
And this is how the Earth looks from the surface of the red planet. It's hard to disagree with this inscription.
Here's another image of the Martian sky. More bright point Venus, less bright (pointed to by the arrows) is our home planet
For those interested, a very atmospheric photo of a sunset on Mars. Somewhat reminiscent of a similar shot from a movie Stranger.
Images from Saturn's orbit
Higher resolution
But the Earth in one of the pictures taken by the apparatus mentioned at the beginning Cassini. The image itself is composite and was taken in September 2006. It was made up of 165 photographs taken in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrum, which were then glued together and processed, making the colors look natural. In contrast to this mosaic, the July 19 survey will film Earth and the Saturn system for the first time in so-called natural colors, that is, as the human eye would see them. In addition, for the first time, the Earth and Moon will be captured by Cassini's highest-resolution camera ever.
By the way, here’s what Jupiter looks like from Saturn’s orbit. The image, of course, was also taken by the Cassini spacecraft. On that moment gas giants separated by a distance of 11 astronomical units.
Family portrait from the inside solar system
This portrait of the solar system was made by the apparatus MESSENGER, orbiting Mercury in November 2010. The mosaic, compiled from 34 images, shows all the planets of the solar system, except for Uranus and Neptune, which were too far away to be recorded. In the photographs you can see the Moon, the four main satellites of Jupiter and even a piece of the Milky Way.
Actually, our home planet .
Diagram of the location of the apparatus and planets at the time of shooting.
And finally, the father of all family portraits and ultra-distant photographs - a mosaic of 60 photographs taken by the same Voyager 1 between February 14 and June 6, 1990. After the passage of Saturn in November 1980, the device was generally inactive - others celestial bodies he had nothing left to study, and there were still about 25 years of flight left before approaching the heliopause boundary.
After numerous requests, Carl Sagan managed to convince NASA management to reactivate the ship's cameras, which were turned off a decade ago, and take a photograph of all the planets in the solar system. The only things that were not photographed were Mercury (which was too close to the Sun), Mars (which, again, was hindered by the light from the Sun) and Pluto, which was simply too small.
"Take another look at this point. It's here. This is our home. This is us. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every person who has ever existed lived their lives on our many pleasures and sufferings, thousands of self-confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and gatherer, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every couple in love, every mother and every father, every bright child, inventor and traveler, every ethics teacher, every deceitful politician, every " superstar,” every “greatest leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived here—on a speck suspended in a ray of sunshine.
The earth is a very small stage in the vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood shed by all these generals and emperors so that, in the rays of glory and triumph, they might become the short-term masters of a grain of sand. Think of the endless cruelties committed by the inhabitants of one corner of this point on the barely distinguishable inhabitants of another corner. About how often disagreements are between them, about how eager they are to kill each other, about how hot their hatred is.
Our posturing, our imagined importance, the illusion of our privileged status in the universe - they all give in to this point of pale light. Our planet is just a lonely speck of dust in the surrounding cosmic darkness. In this grandiose emptiness there is not a hint that someone will come to our aid in order to save us from our own ignorance.
Earth is the only one so far known world, capable of supporting life. We have nowhere else to go—at least not in the near future. To visit - yes. Colonize - not yet. Whether you like it or not, the Earth is our home now."
It's always interesting how things on Earth look when viewed from space. And are they visible at all? Some of geographical elements relief and man-made structures are large enough to be visible from space. Here is a list of 10 things on Earth that astronauts see.
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10Night cities
From space, astronauts can identify continents on Earth by analyzing their shape. But the sight of illuminated cities has a more impressive visual effect. Mostly, we're talking about O major cities Worldwide. Astronauts see illuminated areas of the United States, Europe and India.
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9Palm Islands, Dubai
The Palm Islands, along with the Dubai World Islands, are visible even from space. Since these are the world's largest artificial islands, this is not surprising. The Palm Islands are actually three palm-shaped artificial islands spread over an area of 60 square meters. km. Here you will find hundreds of luxury hotels, villas, shopping centers and parks - the present man-made miracle. The World Islands archipelago covers an area of more than 9 square kilometers and contains 300 artificial islands built from sand on the shallow coastline of Dubai.
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8Phytoplankton bloom
Plankton is one of the most common and amazing phenomena in the ocean - countless microscopic algae wandering along the surface of the water. The process of plankton blooming is visible even from space; it is filmed by satellites such as Terra and Aqua from NASA.
Plankton is food for many ocean inhabitants from small fish to large whales. He also plays important role in converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. Plankton begins to bloom in warm waters ocean, which from space looks like a multi-colored whirlpool.
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7Greenhouses of Almeria, Spain
Almeria's greenhouses are the heart Agriculture Spain. They are located on an area of 259 sq. km. These plastic greenhouses are visible from space in daytime days. Several hundred tons of vegetables and fruits are produced here every year, and from here the products are exported to many European countries. This economic miracle of Spain attracts many tourists, making Almeria a popular tourist destination in Spain.
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6Pyramids of Giza
One of the seven wonders ancient world has also become a favorite place on Earth for astronauts who want to get a spectacular photo of the Earth from space orbit. The pyramids are not visible to the naked eye from space; astronauts use a camera with a long focal length. Cameras with high resolution The ISS has taken many detailed images of the Pyramids of Giza from space.
On satellite images pyramids of Giza from the southeastern part they seem to be illuminated by the Sun. Also in these photographs you can see the statue of the Sphinx.
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5Ganges Delta
The Ganges Delta is the largest river delta in the world, located in the Bay of Bengal in the territory of Bangladesh and India, in the region called West Bengal. The delta covers an area of more than 100 thousand square meters. km. This amazing territory can also be seen from Earth's orbit.
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4Grand Canyon
Of course, exploring every meter of the Grand Canyon in Arizona will take a lot of time. But astronauts orbiting the Earth are lucky enough to see the entire Grand Canyon at once. Satellite images of the Grand Canyon help scientists map the Canyon's surface as well as monitor changes in its topography.
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3Amazon river
Almost 7 thousand km of the Amazon River and its tributaries are visible to astronauts from Earth orbit. During floods, the river forms branches, like the lines of a spider's web, which are visible from space. In satellite images of the Amazon, the color of the water appears very dark due to the color of the soil of the lowland forests surrounding the river.
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2Great Barrier Reef
The 2,500 km Great Barrier Reef makes it the largest coral reef on Earth. It's also the biggest Living being in this world that can be seen from space. The Great Barrier Reef connects more than 900 islands and reefs located in eastern Australia. It is included in the list of objects world heritage UNESCO and is home to 1,500 species of tropical fish. It is also an excellent area for scuba divers and a popular tourist destination in Australia.
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1Himalayas
The Himalayan Mountains, home to the world's highest peaks, are also clearly visible from space. The highest mountain range on the planet separates the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan plateau, where Mount Everest is located - the most high mountain in the world. There are hundreds in the Himalayas mountain peaks, whose height exceeds 7200 meters. Many sections of this mountain range are sacred to both Hinduism and Buddhism.
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Conclusion
It was an article: What can be seen on Earth from space? TOP 10. Thank you for your attention.
Incredible facts
IN last years the myth that the Great One can be seen from space Chinese wall was finally debunked.
Although the wall is long, it is not wide enough and blends in too well with environment to be noticeable from space .
Many people are probably disappointed by this fact, but there are many beautiful things on earth that can be seen from space, especially while in low Earth orbit where satellites and the International Space Station are located.
Open pits
Quarries are essentially massive pits from which gold, copper, uranium and other minerals are extracted. To gain access to resources, you need to dig a hole in the ground, which widens and deepens until a person finds what he is looking for.
Therefore, such pits are often expanded to gigantic sizes, which become visible from space, like any lake or mountain.
For example, the Russian one, which is closed today diamond mine"World" so colossal in size that Russian officials had to close for flights this zone. Apparently, the hole, 523 meters deep and 1,200 meters wide, created such a strong downdraft that it caused helicopters to fall from the sky.
And it's not even the largest mine in the world. The mine bears this title Bingham Canyon(Bingham Canyon), also known as copper mine Kennecott, located outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.
The depth of the mine is 1.2 km, width – 4.4 km. Until 2030, the mine will still be expanding. NASA astronauts did it amazing photo the grand Bingham Canyon while passing over it while on the ISS.
Seasons
Those who have been in orbit for quite a long time can actually monitor how the seasons change based on changing topography of the planet. However, even we earthly inhabitants can see this fascinating transformation thanks to satellite images NASA.
When the monthly images are combined into an animation, they show the ebb and flow of the tides polar ice, dry and wet seasons in the tropics, and the growth cycle of vegetation around the world.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to observe is the formation arctic ice, as well as how it retreats annually. Speaking about this process in numbers: Arctic sea ice in the coldest months of the year covers an area of 15 million square kilometers , in summer the space it occupies is halved.
For comparison: Antarctica is losing almost all of its ice (18 million square kilometers in winter to 3 million in summer).
Forest fires
For those who live in dry, hot conditions, the constant threat of fires is simply a fact of life. Smoke and ash from this disaster "adjusts" the brightness of the sky for hundreds of kilometers, and during fires such an amount of smoke is produced that even astronauts can tell that something is burning.
The picture above shows a satellite photograph taken in October 2003 during a fire in California that started just above Santa Barbara and extended all the way to Mexican border. Because of strong winds Santa Anna, this fire, along with several others at the time, burned more than 240,000 hectares of land across the state and destroyed a large number of human lives.
However, the fire may not be of such a scale visible from space. NASA specialists have at their disposal whole collection photographs of smoke from fires, large and small.
One of the most interesting is a series of photographs showing hundreds of small fires over Africa that broke out at the same time. However, it is widely believed that this smoke had another origin: several farmers were burning their land for agricultural purposes.
Volcanic eruptions
Every year there are 50-60 volcanic eruptions on Earth. Astronauts can see any of them in the form of rising ash and smoke from a natural chimney. Sometimes even burning, glowing magma is visible far beyond the stratosphere.
Sarychev volcano (pictured above) is located in the northwest Pacific Ocean and is one of the most active volcanoes in the world. Since 1946, the volcano has erupted 8 times. During its eruption in 2009 shock wave was very strong, “blowing up the clouds” and giving the opportunity astronauts get a surprisingly clear photo of this phenomenon.
Other maximally active volcanoes are Mount Stromboli in Italy, Mount Etna in Italy, Mount Yasur in Vanuatu. All of them constantly erupt over hundreds and even thousands of years.
How the earth is seen from space
The glow of phytoplankton
Phytoplankton are microscopic, plant-like organisms that reproduce rapidly and create huge algae blooms on the surface of the ocean. They accumulate into such large and large populations that sometimes the only way to see them in their entirety is to look from space.
Their blooms can span over hundreds of kilometers, and since they follow ocean current, phytoplankton can take on very beautiful blue-green shapes.
Flowering begins when ocean waters mix, and phytoplankton gets maximum amount light and nutrients. It also serves as food for a variety of marine life, and is the basis food chain ocean.
It is also a major carbon dioxide sink, absorbing about a third of all the CO2 humanity produces from burning fossil fuels. Photo of a plankton bloom taken in 2010 off the coast of Ireland by a NASA satellite.
The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland is believed to have provided phytoplankton iron and other nutrients, which allowed it to grow to such impressive sizes.
Border between India and Pakistan
No best place than space to see all the beauty of our planet and the interconnection between each other human race. However, even rising hundreds of kilometers above the Earth, we can still see some not entirely pleasant aspects of life, which we ourselves create.
Let's take, for example, man-made border between India and Pakistan. The two countries are so close to each other that they have erected a physical militarized border that is floodlit at night to prevent ammunition trafficking and terrorist crossings.
The border is illuminated so brightly that the 2,900-kilometer demarcation line is clearly visible from the ISS. The border passes through various terrains, including cities and deserts, but, surprisingly, it burns along its entire length.
Over the past decades, the India-Pakistan border has been one of the most dangerous places in the world, plagued by lawlessness, violence and deadly standoffs.
Deforestation
Looking at the planet from above, you can easily get a real view of what is happening to it. One such example is deforestation. If a person could stay in space for 30 or 40 years, then he could see with his own eyes what satellites have been documenting for many years: consistent and regular loss of forest areas.
The image above was taken by NASA's Landsat 1 satellite and is "one of" in a long line of photos that reveal a startling change appearance tropical forests Amazon between 2000 and 2012.
In just 37 years, this area, covered with lush and dense trees, has lost 2,500 square kilometers of forest. This can be seen very clearly in photographs from space. In general, over the entire history of its existence, the Amazon forests have lost 360,000 square kilometers.
What can be seen from space
Sandstorm
There are three main components required for a sandstorm to form: wind, sand or dust, and dryness. When these three components come together to ideal conditions, incredible flows begin to rise at speeds of up to 160 kilometers per hour, sweeping away everything and everyone in their path.
These storms are sometimes so large that they can be observed from the ISS. For example, the photo above shows a sandstorm that covered Egypt and stretched across almost the entire Red Sea.
Similar sandstorms occur regularly off the coast of Africa, China and other places where trade winds can carry dust for thousands of kilometers. This is not uncommon for the dust and sand of the Sahara create dirty and foggy skies over the entire Caribbean.
Sandstorms cause damage to buildings, people and animals, but they also bring benefits by delivering minerals and other nutrients to places where vegetation accumulates, such as, for example, the Amazon forests.
Borders between rich and poor countries
Modern civilizations have such an impact on Earth that the borders between countries are clearly visible even from a height of hundreds of kilometers. NASA astronaut John Grunsfeld flew on the space shuttle five times during his career.
He said that rich countries tend to "glow" green, while the poorer ones who have access to drinking water limited, “painted” an unpleasant brown.
In addition, countries for which electricity is not commonplace become noticeably dim at night and stand in stark contrast to neighboring states whose bright cities light up the sky.
This difference is especially noticeable between the borders of Northern and South Korea. At night, South Korea is like any other modern country, is burning while North Korea is so dark that the state is practically disappearing.
In the photo above you can see how South Korea is “burning” in the lower right corner (the brightest spot is Seoul). China is equally bright throughout its entire territory (opposite part of the photo). But where is North Korea?
No, she didn't drown in the ocean. In fact, The "black mass" between South Korea and China is the desired territory. Also note the Tangerine Demilitarized Zone. Only the capital, Pyongyang, is visible.
While North Korea It's hard to blame light pollution, but this photo clearly illustrates how most of countries most likely live without electricity, as well as without everything connected with it: heat in winter period, refrigeration, appropriate temperatures in hospitals, etc.