World Air Traffic 2009 - How cool is data?!?!

The yellow dots are airplanes in the sky during a 24 hour period.
Stay with the picture. You will see the light of the day moving from the east to the west, as the Earth spins on its axis. Also you will see the aircraft flow of traffic leaving the North American continent and travelling at night to arrive in the UK in the morning. Then you will see the flow changing, leaving the UK in the morning and flying to the American continent in daylight.
It is a 24 hour observation of all of the large aircraft flights in the world, condensed down to about 2 minutes. From space we look like a bee hive of activity.
You could tell it was summer time in the north by the suns foot print over the planet. You could see that it didn't quite set in the extreme north and it didn't quite rise in the extreme south.
We are taught about the earths tilt and how it causes summer and winter and have had to imagine just what is going on. With this 24 hour observation of aircraft travel on the earth's surface we get to see the daylight pattern move as well.