Lights Out

From NASA's Astronomy Picture Of The Day Archive.  First, a shot from the International Space Station of the U.S. East Coast from Norfolk, Virginia to Hartford, Connecticut - you can almost see our house!
Second, a photo of what Shanghai would look like at night without any city lights - something you will never see in reality.  What the photographer Thierry Cohen did was take a daylight image of the city and match it with a dark sky region from the same latitude.  The picture is taken from Puxi, the older district of Shanghai, looking across the Huangpu River to Pudong, the part of the city I usually stayed in on business trips. Everything you see in the picture was constructed in the past 20 years.  You can find photos of other cities using the same technique at Cohen's website.