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Sources

What the scene is made of

The background is a real-time flight at night from the south end of Central Park down Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the Battery, ending over the Upper New York Bay. Its geography comes from free public data published by the City of New York, the U.S. Census Bureau, and FEMA with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The night itself is simulated: it is not night photography, not photogrammetry, and not a record of which rooms or streets were lit on any real night. Nothing in the scene is photographic: facades, trees, vehicles and boats are procedural shapes placed on real positions where those exist.

Ground and water

  • NYC Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), 2024 orthoimagery (6-inch true orthophotography, captured 14–24 March 2024). Licence: CC BY 4.0, as stated in OTI’s official imagery metadata. Licence caveat: the imagery’s ArcGIS catalogue item links the generic NYC.gov Terms of Use instead; clarification from OTI is needed before any public publication.
  • Modified: the daytime photo no longer colours the streets. Roads, sidewalks, plazas, parks, medians and parking lots are drawn from the city’s 2022 planimetric map (NYC OTI: roadbed, sidewalk, plaza, park, median and parking-lot polygons), each with an authored reflectance. The photo adds only surface texture and shows where trees stand in parks; its sun shadows are never used. Street light is added along the city’s street centrelines (NYC DCP/OTI centreline) at typical spacing, with a mix of lamp colours, on the sidewalks, plus warm spill in front of shops and a few low lamps in small parks. These lamp positions are authored, not a survey of real lamp posts.
  • Trees: about 66,000 street trees at their real positions and trunk diameters (NYC Parks 2015 Street Tree Census, NYC Open Data; crown size and height follow from the trunk, and trees are drawn in leaf, so they may have changed since 2015), plus procedural trees in parks and medians, placed where the photo shows canopy on planted ground. The census holds street trees only: trees inside parks are plausible, not surveyed.
  • Traffic and vessels: about 26,000 vehicles run on the real street network in its real one-way directions (NYC centreline), and on the two bridge decks; how many, how fast and which are taxis are authored, and headlights and tail lights follow the direction of travel. Ferries and boats run on the real ferry routes (NYC centreline); aircraft and helicopters are illustrative, and so is the sky (a slow cloud deck lit from below and a few stars). None of it is a record of real traffic or weather.
  • Water follows official shorelines: NYC OTI 2022 planimetric hydrography (minus piers and jetties) inside the city, and U.S. Census TIGER water (public domain) in New Jersey and where the city’s layer has gaps offshore. The water surface, ripples and reflections are a shader effect confined to those polygons.

Buildings

  • NYC OTI building footprints (NYC Open Data), queried 28 September 2026: about 39,000 buildings in Manhattan below 72nd Street, the Brooklyn waterfront and the tallest buildings of the other boroughs.
  • NYC OTI 3-D Building Model (2014): about 28,500 buildings keep its setbacks, spires and crowns where a heuristic match with today’s footprint holds (same ID, overlapping outline, consistent height). This is not a guarantee that every roof is unchanged since 2014. Other buildings are today’s footprints raised to their recorded roof height as single blocks.
  • New Jersey waterfront (Hoboken, Jersey City, Weehawken, Bayonne): 1,625 buildings from USA Structures (FEMA Geospatial Response Office and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published by CalHHS OpenData; CC BY 4.0), the ones that record a height of at least 12 m from a 2013 LiDAR survey, drawn as plain blocks at that height. Towers finished since 2013 are missing or too low; lower and more distant buildings appear only as street light and a dim, authored glow.
  • Rooftop water tanks: about 4,300 of the 4,465 tanks in the city’s 2022 planimetric map, at their real positions, sizes and heights; the barrel-and-frame shape is generic.
  • Authored reconstructions, not survey geometry: the tower shafts of Central Park Tower, 111 West 57th Street, 432 Park Avenue, One Vanderbilt, 30 Hudson Yards and 3 World Trade Center were traced from the 2024 orthophoto because their footprints include lower bases; their intermediate setbacks are approximate. 56 Leonard Street is drawn at its published 821 ft because its recorded height (255 ft) is wrong. The Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge are simplified reconstructions from their centrelines and published dimensions.
  • Facades are drawn procedurally. NYC DCP MapPLUTO (building class, floors, year built, retail area) chooses the window rhythm, glazing and light colour for each building; the windows themselves, which rooms are lit, the crown floodlighting of a few landmarks and the red aviation lights are authored. No facade is a photograph.

Opening photograph (optional)

  • When the home page is opened with the orbital introduction, its first image is a real photograph, not part of the simulated scene: “New York City at night”, taken from the International Space Station on 17 March 2016 by NASA astronaut Tim Kopra. NASA images are in the public domain; the file is ISS-47 New York City at night on Wikimedia Commons.

Not modelled

  • Ground relief (the ground is flat) and people (from the height of the flight, 100 to 500 m up, a person would be one to four pixels tall); most buildings in New Jersey and most low buildings in Brooklyn and Queens, which appear only as street light and an authored glow.
  • Parapets, rooftop equipment and most setbacks on buildings drawn as blocks; the cantilevers and stacked forms of recent towers beyond the simple tiers described above.

All data is served from this site; the page makes no requests to other services. Full provenance, file hashes and processing steps are in SOURCES.md in the project.

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