Welcome to the "Earth Observation and Remote Sensing using nighttime lights" wiki! This wiki was created for two reasons: first, to help people who are interested in night light remote sensing to to get started rapidly. Second, to serve as a quick reference resource for experts in the field.
The three most commonly used instruments for Earth observation at night and remote sensing using nighttime lights are VIIRS-DNB, SDGSat-1, and ISS photos.
During summer, 2026, we plan to develop tutorials that show examples of using VIIRS-DNB and SDGSat-1.
The Nighttime Light Remote Sensing group at the Ruhr University Bochum runs a newsletter for this community. If you'd like to be informed of new developments and/or join the webinar series, sign up here.
The following people have contributed to the development of this wiki:
If you would like to contribute to this wiki, please contact Hector Linares.
The text on all of the pages of this Wiki is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For citation purposes, please use "Earth observation and remote sensing using nighttime lights wiki" as the author.
Our policy is to include licensing information for each images. In the unexpected case that an image does not include licensing information, it should be assumed that the author of the image has withheld copyright, the images are not licensed for re-use, and the image should not have been uploaded. Editors should therefore remove images that do not include copyright information.
This material has been put together collaboratively as a voluntary service. While we aim to keep these pages correct and up to date, every page of the wiki is a secondary source and therefore subject to potential error by the wiki contributors.