INDFocus

This week in cool photos from space

by Walter Pierce

A pre-dawn photo of the Southeastern United States extending roughly from Houston to the edge of the Florida panhandle has been making the rounds on social media and it's awesome.

A pre-dawn photo — you can see the sunrise occurring somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean at the time the pic was taken — of the Southeastern United States extending roughly from Houston in the west to the edge of the Florida panhandle in the east has been making the rounds on social media and it's awesome.

It was, according to Facebook (where everything is true) recently shot from the International Space Station. Not only does it underscore why amateur astronomers have to drive way out into the sticks for good celestial viewing — light pollution! — it gives a good sense of the relative size of metro areas in our neck of the woods.

Can you match the blotches of light with their cities? We’ve identified several in a second image, which you can see by scrolling down this page a ways.

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Here's our best guess on the cities captured in the image: