Liege, Belgium. The brightly lit core of the Liege urban area lies at the center of a network of roadways, traceable by continuous orange lighting extending out into the rural and relatively dark Belgian countryside. For a sense of scale, the distance from image left to right is approximately 70 kilometers (43 miles). The region to the southeast of Verviers includes agricultural fields and forest; hence, it appears almost uniformly dark at night. The image was taken using the European Space Agency's Nodding mechanism on the International Space Station (ISS), also known as the NightPod. This electro-mechanical mount system for digital cameras was designed to compensate for the motion of the ISS relative to the Earth. The primary goal was to take high-resolution, long-exposure digital imagery of the Earth from the ISS Cupola, particularly cities at night.