Chennai City Lights
Chennai at night from orbit: a city of 8.7 million under white LED streetlights, whose colour survives only on camera.
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At about 9:13 on the evening of 2 May 2026, a photograph from the International Space Station caught Chennai lit white. NASA identifies the street lighting as white LEDs. The metropolitan area holds about 8.7 million people, on India's southern coast. Lit streets fan inland from the shoreline in a dense lattice. At the top-left headland, a bright port or industrial cluster stands apart from the street pattern.
Only a high-resolution photograph keeps the colour: satellites mapping Earth at night measure brightness alone. Christopher Small of Columbia University identifies warmer oranges and yellows in astronaut photographs as likely high-pressure sodium and cooler greens and blues as mercury vapour, two other kinds of lamp. The frame was shot on a 200 mm lens with the Sun 38 degrees below the horizon, so every light in it is artificial.
