Earth at Night Gadget and Mapplet

A Google Map overlay showing global city lights, precisely correlated to the base map. A striking illustration of population densities, energy usage, and light pollution worldwide.

Want your own Earth at Night map?

Technical Note

This gadget is interesting to programmers for being a cross-API implementation: both the Google Gadgets and Mapplets platforms are supported from the same source. Not only is this preferable from a software-engineering standpoint, it avoids duplication in the Google directory, which is shared between the two APIs.

Interested in doing your own cross-API map gadget? Here's a template outlining my approach.