About This Picture

This NASA low light level image of the Korean peninsula was taken on the  night of  April 15, 2001.  I first saw this image when I was serving with the Army in Korea, and it became popular to put this image,  and perhaps  other similar images  you can find on the  Web, on soldiers’ farewell plaques.  I found this particular  image  here, at the Web site of the left-of-center Federation of American Scientists, after Christopher Hitchens linked it in his excellent article, “Worse than 1984:  North Korea, Slave State.

One curious thing about the original is that you actually can see much more light off the coasts near Pohang and Pusan than you can on land in North Korea.  I believe those off-shore light sources are squid boats, which attract their catch with bright lights.  Anyway, that’s my working theory.

On  occasion, I get e-mails accusing me of altering this image,  suggesting that I dimmed or grayed out  the  lights of Pyongyang or other cities in the North.  If you examine the original, you can see that’s not the case; in any event, a small amount of light is visible in Pyongyang.   I did make other stylistic alternations to the image, most of them obvious.  I cut the Korean peninsula out of the original image, changed the surrounding areas to transparent, changed the eerie green boundary  lines  to gray, and restored  the extreme northeastern parts of North Hamgyeong Province, which had been cut out of the original image.  That’s it.