Astronaut photograph of the bright city lights of Las Vegas, including those from the stadium where the Super Bowl LVIII game will be played, captured on September 17, 2022, from the International Space Station.
A large stadium contributes to the nighttime illumination of Las Vegas, which hosts the Super Bowl for the first time in 2024.
Las Vegas knows a thing or two about putting on a show. In February 2024, the Nevada desert city will put on one of the year’s biggest shows in sports when it hosts Super Bowl LVIII. The “Big Game” will feature professional American football teams, the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, vying for the National Football League championship.
Allegiant Stadium’s Features
The bright city lights of Las Vegas, including those from the stadium where the game will be played, are visible in this photograph shot by an astronaut aboard the International Space StationThe International Space Station (ISS) is a large spacecraft in orbit around the Earth that serves as a research laboratory and spaceport for international collaboration in space exploration. It was launched in 1998 and has been continuously occupied by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts from around the world since 2000. The ISS is a joint project of five space agencies: NASA (USA), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA (Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada). It orbits the Earth at an altitude of approximately 400 kilometers (250 miles), and provides a unique platform for scientific research, technological development, and human space exploration.” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>International Space Station. Allegiant Stadium was completed in 2020 with a price tag of nearly $2 billion. It contains 28,000 tons of structural steel, seats 65,000 people, and is enclosed on its northern side by basketball-court-sized panels that can open to views of the Las Vegas Strip. Among its sustainability features, the venue is fully powered by renewable energy, and its roof is made of a translucent material that lets in natural light while blocking the heat of the Sun.
The glaring lights of the stadium and the Strip feature prominently in the photo and contrast with the relatively dark adjacent runways of Harry Reid International Airport. Most of the bright white, saturated pixels in this photo contain a mix of light sources, said Christopher Small, a geophysicist at Columbia UniversityColumbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City that was established in 1754. This makes it the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest in the United States. It is often just referred to as Columbia, but its official name is Columbia University in the City of New York.” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>Columbia University who studies anthropogenic night light. Lights in more residential outlying areas tend to have warmer spectra typical of low-pressure sodium lights.
Understanding Urban Night Lights
In recent work, Small developed a method for distinguishing different lighting types within image pixels in nighttime photos from NASAEstablished in 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the United States Federal Government that succeeded the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). It is responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and aerospace research. Its vision is "To discover and expand knowledge for the benefit of humanity." Its core values are "safety, integrity, teamwork, excellence, and inclusion." NASA conducts research, develops technology and launches missions to explore and study Earth, the solar system, and the universe beyond. It also works to advance the state of knowledge in a wide range of scientific fields, including Earth and space science, planetary science, astrophysics, and heliophysics, and it collaborates with private companies and international partners to achieve its goals.” data-gt-translate-attributes=”[{“attribute”:”data-cmtooltip”, “format”:”html”}]” tabindex=”0″ role=”link”>NASA’s Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. He then quantified the brightness, color, and extent of urban night lights from the photographs to glean insight into how cities grow and evolve.
Growth has been a through line in Las Vegas’s story over the past several decades. The greater Las Vegas metropolitan area has added nearly 1 million people to its population since the year 2000. Its growth spurt—readily apparent from space—began decades earlier, though. A time series of Landsat images (see video below) compiled by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio shows the city’s outward expansion from 1972 to 2021.
[embedded content]
Timelapse animation of Lake Mead and the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, from 1972-2021, as captured by Landsat sensors. The images are false-color, showing healthy vegetation in red.
As the city has grown, so has its footprint of night lights. But despite its reputation as the “Neon City,” Las Vegas is not all that unique in its luminosity, said Small. For example, he pointed out, “both Tokyo and Shanghai have some very impressive lightscapes, although clouds and humidity often blur the view of both cities.” Vegas benefits from its altitude and dry atmospheric conditions for clearer views from space, as in this astronaut photo.
Las Vegas experienced unusually cool and wet weather in the week leading up to the Super Bowl due to an atmospheric river moving inland from California. More typical clear skies are forecast for game time, but weather conditions should factor little into the game since the stadium is enclosed.
Credit line Astronaut photograph ISS067-E-369057 was acquired on September 17, 2022, with a Nikon D5 digital camera using a focal length of 400 millimeters. The image was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by a member of the Expedition 67 crew. It has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the greatest value to scientists and the public and to make those images freely available on the Internet.
Source: SciTechDaily
