A recurring brightness anomaly in the satellite's calibration data turned out not to follow the Gregorian calendar but the lunar calendar, peaking on the last day of Ramadan, the Eid. This showed the instrument wasn't malfunctioning: it was picking up a real, repeatable increase in nighttime lighting tied to a religious observance, revealing that the night-band data could track human cultural activity, not just test the sensor.
- 01
The team initially suspected the instrument's high-gain stage, which detects faint signals, was broken before ruling it out.
- 02
The pattern was checked against 2013 and 2014 data and lined up with Ramadan's end each year.
- 03
Noticing this led the team to also look for, and find, Christmas lighting in the same dataset.
224 words · auto-generated from the episode video
4:11tracking how the data changes in a place where there's no clouds where the moon goes up and down up and down and suddenly so you it doesn't reach a peak and suddenly boom and we have to look at it like three or four times we're seeing pics over like the bright lights in all major metropolitan districts in this region. Why? That every research article that we had read since then told us that yes, lights do increase gradually from year to year, but it takes time. It shouldn't be from one season to the next. >> Mhm. >> And we thought the instrument was
4:52broken. >> Okay. Interesting. We thought okay the low gain stage is suff the high gain stings that detects very small ch signals would broke it wasn't broken and we knew because we had corrected two data sets and the anomaly was following the lunar calendar not the Gregoria calendar and who uses the lunar calendar right >> musloops. >> Uhhuh. And so when we looked at 2013 and 2014, the anomaly had perfectly matched against the last day of Ramadan the AA. So we were mapping Ramadan from space. The instrument was fine, but it had given us a gift. They had given us a capability to monitor humanity from
5:35space and literally culture from space.
Remote SensingEarth ObservationEnergy AccessOpen Data