Lights From Space Map Help

[Durakken]

If you need some help with scale and how visible a given light source is... Consider this article http://www.livescience.com/33895-human-eye.html

Now if you say you can see a candle up to 50 km away then you can create a measurement of for every meter that you move away from a candle the will get 0.02 % dimmer (I don't want to figure how to transfer that into the inverse square law). So if you are at a height of 50 km you can resolve 1 point of light for each candle. However if you add another candle you'll be able to see light there at something like 100 km away, but not resolve that there are 2 candles. So if you want to see a light from say, 1000km up you're going to need a lot more candles or the equivalent of it. My math is surely wrong here but that article and this idea should be able to help you tell if something should be seen from the vantage point you're looking at or not.

[Hai-Etlik]

If you need some help with scale and how visible a given light source is... Consider this article http://www.livescience.com/33895-human-eye.html

Now if you say you can see a candle up to 50 km away then you can create a measurement of for every meter that you move away from a candle the will get 0.02 % dimmer (I don't want to figure how to transfer that into the inverse square law). So if you are at a height of 50 km you can resolve 1 point of light for each candle. However if you add another candle you'll be able to see light there at something like 100 km away, but not resolve that there are 2 candles. So if you want to see a light from say, 1000km up you're going to need a lot more candles or the equivalent of it. My math is surely wrong here but that article and this idea should be able to help you tell if something should be seen from the vantage point you're looking at or not.

Please stop. Taking real numbers and applying arbitrary arithmetic to them gives arbitrary and meaningless answers. You'd be no worse of just picking numbers at random as your result. It's less effort and more honest (the numbers are meaningless, but it's clearer that they are meaningless) In fact if you just guessed, you'd at least have a chance of being right. Using a linear extrapolation of a quadratic function, it's certain that you will be way, way, way off. If a light is visible at 50 km, then a light visible at 1000 km wouldn't need to be 20 times brighter, it would need to be 400 times brighter.

[Durakken]

Please stop. Taking real numbers and applying arbitrary arithmetic to them gives arbitrary and meaningless answers. You'd be no worse of just picking numbers at random as your result. It's less effort and more honest (the numbers are meaningless, but it's clearer that they are meaningless) In fact if you just guessed, you'd at least have a chance of being right. Using a linear extrapolation of a quadratic function, it's certain that you will be way, way, way off. If a light is visible at 50 km, then a light visible at 1000 km wouldn't need to be 20 times brighter, it would need to be 400 times brighter.

Getting these numbers give you an understanding of how much light needs to be there to be seen from space. It's obvious I know that it can't possibly be 20 times brighter and make it clear that to get the right answer you're going to have figure out that thing that I didn't care to figure out and get an answer. I can only guess that you give the answer, because you were too busy complaining than helping and saying whether what you said is a random guess or the actual answer you came to.

Anyways, if the answer is 400 times brighter then you know that what you need to be seen from space is between a light 400 time brighter than a single candle to hundreds of tiny light sources that are overlapping each other. Knowing that small towns in the past reached only around 500 people. villages maybe 2000, average cities were around 1km and had about 20,000 people and larger cities up to 200,000 (ignoring greek city states with 500k to 1m) then you could map that knowing a rough population easily because 1km = 1px = 1town = 1px of barely visible light... villages would have 4 px of barely visible light... and average cities would have 50px to 500px of barely visible light getting brighter towards the center. At least as a general guide, because it's obvious that not everyone is running around with candles and there are flames that are brighter that are used all the time. But then in a modern city it also gives you a rough estimate because street lights and people leaving their house lights on.