The NOAA-20 polar-orbiting satellite's Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) sent back its first day-night band images twenty-five days after the satellite was launched. In this image, captured December 13, 2017, the bright lights of urban centers such as Tokyo and Seoul stand out in sharp contrast to more rural land areas and dark ocean surfaces. The glow of fishing vessels off the coast of South Korea is also clearly visible.
The VIIRS day-night band layer is created using a sensing technique designed to capture low-light emissions under varying illumination conditions, and is displayed as a gray-scale image. A higher signal-to-noise ratio compared with the Suomi NPP satellite's day-night band results in sharper imagery.