I made picture below to see how planet Mars would look at night if there is people living like on Earth. It started from Mars elevation map (topology map downloaded from NASA's page) where I set sea level so that water covers about half of surface. Then lights were added based on few simple rules: Not to water, less on high grounds or near north and south poles, more on coasts and places where there already is lights before.
Unfortunately there is no bigger version of this available. I used this picture in one space/science picture competition but less imaginative pictures won :-)
There are certain obvious flaws in this picture. For example lights are far too smoothly distributed. They should be more in spots and then roads could connect these cities. My computer back then was far too slow for anything better than this. Also a daylight map for comparison would be nice.
Another try six year later. Terraformed and inhabited Mars at night. This turned out much better already. There is still some problems like cities are bit too "stardusty" (they should have more exact centers with roads going out). Also tiny islands shouldn't have so much bright lights. Maybe another version again after few years :-)
Click picture for the full size image (8640 * 3900 pixels, about 8,5 megabytes). It have much nicer looking details.
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