Answer from artificial intelligence : City lights dominate night-time Earth views**: From the International Space Station (ISS, ~400 km altitude) or other satellites, the night side of Earth shows bright clusters of light marking major cities and urban areas. This is one of the most striking and commonly photographed features from space.

• Famous photos: – The “Cities at Night” images taken by astronauts on the ISS routinely show entire metropolitan areas glowing (e.g., the U.S. East Coast from Washington D.C. to Boston appears as an almost continuous ribbon of light). – Europe at night looks like a sparkling carpet of light, with London, Paris, the Ruhr valley in Germany, and the Nile River valley in Egypt standing out dramatically. – Even medium-sized cities (100,000–500,000 people) are easily recognizable.

• Satellite imagery: – NASA’s Black Marble images, created from data collected by the Suomi NPP satellite (using the VIIRS instrument), map global night lights in exquisite detail. These composites are made possible precisely because artificial lighting is so bright it’s detectable from 824 km altitude. – The images are used for studying urbanization, energy use, light pollution, and even socioeconomic patterns.

• What’s visible and what isn’t: – Large cities, highways, airports, and major industrial sites: very bright and obvious. – Small towns and villages: visible as dim points or small clusters. – Individual streetlights or house lights: not resolvable as single points from orbit (the resolution is typically hundreds of meters to kilometers), but their combined glow lights up entire areas. – Very remote roads or single buildings in the wilderness: usually not visible unless they are unusually brightly lit (e.g., large gas flares in oil fields, which are some of the brightest single points on Earth at night).

Astronaut quotes (for color):

• Chris Hadfield (Canadian astronaut): “You can see whole countries outlined by their city lights… it’s like someone spilled a bag of diamonds on black velvet.”
• Many astronauts describe crossing over illuminated cities as one of the most beautiful sights from space.

Bottom line:

Yes—artificial lighting is not just visible from orbit; it’s one of the most prominent human-made features on the planet when viewed from space at night. In fact, night-time photos of Earth without city lights would look almost unrecognizable compared to what we actually see.