Florida Lights at Night, NASA ISS Modern Photo Ceramic Tile

The peninsula is highly recognizable even at night, especially when looking north, as our map-trained brains expect. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photograph of Florida in October 2014. The peninsula is highly recognizable even at night, especially when looking roughly north, as our map-trained brains expect. Illuminated areas give a strong sense of the size of cities. The brightest continuous patch of lights is the Miami-Fort Lauderdale metropolitan area, the largest urban area in the southeastern U.S. and home to 5.6 million people. The next largest area is the Tampa Bay region (2.8 million people) on the Gulf Coast of the peninsula. Orlando, located in the middle, has a somewhat smaller footprint (2.3 million). A nearly straight line of cities runs nearly 560 kilometers (350 miles) along the Atlantic coast from Jacksonville, Florida, to Wilmington, North Carolina. Image of the Day for November 17, 2014 Instrument: ISS — Digital Camera Appears in these Collections: Astronaut Photography Earth at Night NASA https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/84737/florida-at-night