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As to N. Korea. Do they have electricity. Outside of the capital, not really.

The so called “light pollution” images are over-over-overestimated (especially the low resolution pictures like the NASA .gif images). Around each city there is a bright spot showing the “light pollution”, but if you compare these images with reality (remember a night flight over these areas), you realize that the real “light pollution” is rather small compared to the brightness of the images provided. All these images look like a 60+ seconds exposure of the night sky (which sums up to a “blue sky exposure”) with very bright stars (much brighter than they are in reality).

For example the Canary Islands are rather sparse inhabited and have some hotels in some regions, but in the NASA images there are large bright spots over almost all islands as they are drawn in Central Europe or the USA (here the Google layer is less misleading due to the higher resolution, but the brightness is still to high). On the other hand North Korea is almost not polluted (do they have no electricity there?) while the sea between South Korea and Japan is…

So all these images as well as the Google Earth layer do not show the real extent of “light pollution”, because they are overexposed images (just cartoons showing the intention of the cartoonist camouflaged by NASA graphics) with some qualitative but no quantitative information.

After playing with Miles City USA, I was going to see how the Google Earth ‘DMSP nightlights’ layers performed in a remote area of Western Australia, and thought as a starting point I would use Port Hedland, the largest tonnage port in Australia and a city of around 15,000 (incl. South Hedland), as it is large enough to have a good light footprint while also having many small mining towns and cattle stations nearby, thinking this may be a good test for nightlights.

Anyway, when zooming into NW WA on Google Earth, I noticed another mystery – there were two Port Hedlands a long way apart! One is the real Port Hedland, the other exists in only in the GISS database:

So anyway, having spent time in Port Hedland, I know that the BoM office is at the airport, as anyone can check to make sure here where it says:

Station Details
ID: 004032
Name: PORT HEDLAND AIRPORT
Lat: -20.37
Lon: 118.63
Height: 6.4 m

For further reference, I looked at the station photos available from this site, and after looking at the photos for a bit to imagine what the place looked like from above, I zoomed in on the Port Hedland Airport.

After finding the BoM building, there was the instrument enclosure plain as day, so I marked it with a pin:

I then zoomed out to see where it is in relation to the airport:

And again to see proximity to Port Hedland:

And finally to see how far away NASA GISS thinks it is:

- which turns out to be a little over 100 km away from the real Port Hedland AWS!

1″ too high (or too low) on both lat and long puts you 40 meters off the station.

If you’re looking at lights, I’d think 40 meters is usually going to be sufficiently close to know what the sensor is around.