The Brightest Places On Earth

Christina Seely has photographed Paris, Tokyo and Chicago, among many places. But she's not interested in the Eiffel Tower or other tourist landmarks. Instead, she is photographing the way entire cities glow. According to the NASA map below, three regions of the world are particularly bright at night: the United States, Western Europe and Japan. Seely's series Lux is a study of those luminous locations — of man's visibly bright impact on the planet.

Lux, titled after the system unit for measuring illumination, presents photographic portraits of the cities within the most brightly illuminated regions of the NASA map of the night Earth.

For full screen, click on the four-cornered arrow icon in the viewer's bottom right.

Click to enlarge this NASA image of the world's brightest regions and, accordingly, the top consumers of energy:

Enlarge NASA

Earth at Night,

NASA

Earth at Night,

Seely's work helped inspire the formation of the design collective Civil Twilight. The collective won Metropolis Magazine's 2007 Next Generation Design Competition with a proposal for Lunar Resonant Streetlights, which dim and brighten depending on the brightness of the moon. View more of Seely's work, and read more about her project, on her Web site.

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