Near midnight astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this image of Paris while orbiting at an altitude of 213 nautical miles (394 km). The city is strongly patterned by the street grid because streets are the most consistently lit lines at night, providing a completely different set of features from those seen during the day. A day image shows the winding Seine River is the main visual cue, but here the thin black line of the river is hard to detect, until you focus on the strong meanders that wind across the image from lower left to top right. When you know what to look for you can see street lights on both banks following the course of the river, especially near the city center. The left of the image is north.
Paris, France
Category: Space
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