[地球大观]夜里尼罗

Nile River Delta at Night

One of the fascinating aspects of viewing Earth at night is how well the lights show the distribution of people. In this view of Egypt, we see a population almost completely concentrated along the Nile Valley, just a small percentage of the country’s land area.

地球的迷人夜景之一在于观看灯光如何显示人类活动的分布。在这幅埃及的图像中，我们能看到人群紧紧簇拥于尼罗河谷沿岸——虽然这只是埃及国土上的一小片地区。

The Nile River and its delta look like a brilliant, long-stemmed flower in this astronaut photograph of the southeastern Mediterranean Sea, as seen from the International Space Station. The Cairo metropolitan area forms a particularly bright base of the flower. The smaller cities and towns within the Nile Delta tend to be hard to see amidst the dense agricultural vegetation during the day. However, these settled areas and the connecting roads between them become clearly visible at night. Likewise, urbanized regions and infrastructure along the Nile River becomes apparent (see also The Great Bend of Nile, Day & Night.)

在这幅自国际空间站拍摄的地中海东南部的太空照片里，尼罗河及其三角洲看上去就仿佛一条以异常明亮的开罗市区为源头的灿烂绵延的光带。尼罗河三角洲上的小型市镇在白昼为密集的农林作物所掩蔽，然而，到了夜晚，这些定居点和连结他们的道路就清晰可见了。同时，尼罗河沿岸的城市地区和基础设施也显而易见。（查看“尼罗河大转弯的日与夜”）

Another brightly lit region is visible along the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean—the Tel-Aviv metropolitan area in Israel (image right). To the east of Tel-Aviv lies Amman, Jordan. The two major water bodies that define the western and eastern coastlines of the Sinai Peninsula—the Gulf of Suez and the Gulf of Aqaba—are outlined by lights along their coastlines (image lower right). The city lights of Paphos, Limassol, Larnaca, and Nicosia are visible on the island of Cyprus (image top).

另外一片灯火明亮的地区位于东面地中海海滨——以色列特拉维夫市区（图片右侧）。特拉维夫东侧是约旦的安曼。划分西奈半岛东西两面海岸线的两大水域的轮廓——苏伊士湾和阿卡巴湾——由湾岸的灯光勾勒出来（图片右下方）。塞浦路斯岛上的帕福斯、利马索尔、拉纳卡和尼科西亚的城市灯火亦可见得（图片顶部）。

Scattered blue-grey clouds cover the Mediterranean Sea and the Sinai, while much of northeastern Africa is cloud-free. A thin yellow-brown band tracing the Earth’s curvature at image top is airglow, a faint band of light emission that results from the interaction of atmospheric atoms and molecules with solar radiation at approximately 100 kilometers (60 miles) altitude.

地中海和西奈半岛上方飘散着蓝灰色云彩，而东北非大部则万里无云。图片顶部，地球曲面上方的黄褐色细长曲线是气辉——由于大气粒子与约100千米高度的太阳辐射交互作用产生的模糊光带。

（2010.11.8）

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