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Comment by danielweber | Hacker News Reader

Is something explicitly setting it to black, or is total blackness what the camera is capturing?

My reading of their comment is that there just isn't any light since it's on the night-side of the Earth, and the Sun isn't providing any light over there. If it were over a part of the planet with light pollution, that's probably not strong enough to break through the atmosphere.

Artificial lighting can be seen from space (the only man made thing that can be seen from space), but I guess the camera isn't good enough to pick it up.

Actually that is incorrect. You can see the Great Pyramids from space.

Link: http://d1jqu7g1y74ds1.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2012...

Supporting Article: http://www.universetoday.com/93398/can-you-see-the-pyramids-...

Well, this really depends on what you mean by 'see' (and I suppose what you mean by 'space' as well, but let's just assume the ISS is the benchmark). Pictures like that, afaik, are taken with camera lenses that look roughly like [1]. You definitely can't make out city blocks with just your eyes from the ISS.

[1] http://media.the-digital-picture.com/Images/Other/Canon-EF-8...

NASA actually has a very long history of using Nikon equipment.

Here are a couple references to (still) photography from the ISS:

http://nikonrumors.com/2013/04/07/nikon-gear-at-the-iss.aspx...

http://nikonrumors.com/2013/11/12/low-light-astrophotography...

http://nikonrumors.com/2013/04/22/astronaut-chris-hadfield-h...

http://nikonrumors.com/2012/04/08/nikon-in-space-new-nightpo...

And to study quantum entanglement: http://nikonrumors.com/2013/04/09/400mm-nikon-lens-to-be-mod...

I meant with the naked eye. With an appropriate telescope one can of course see a lot of detail (see Google Maps). And given how low the orbit of the ISS is I guess it's easier to see things from there than from an orbit where there isn't a rest of atmosphere that slows you down (yes, the ISS has to be regularly pushed by space farriers).

Right - if the exposure is fixed so that fully lit side is normally exposed, I wouldn't be surprised if it was totally black on the other side.

Probably helps the video compression for the night side, too!

It is odd just how black the feed is, but here is a shot of the ISS crossing from daylight to shadow to illustrate that it is the real feed and not artificial.

http://i.imgur.com/tgAqmQU.png

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