During this time of year, when millions of people celebrate the Christmas holiday and have decorations up, NASA says that the festive lights can actually be seen from outer space.
The Huffington Post noted that NASA said satellite images show cities shine 20 to 30 percent brighter around the holidays and suburban areas shine 50 percent brighter.
The findings were announced Tuesday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.
"It's a near ubiquitous signal. Despite being ethnically and religiously diverse, we found that the U.S. experiences a holiday increase that is present across most urban communities," said Miguel Roman, a research physical scientist at NASA Goddard and one of the authors of the study. "These lighting patterns are tracking a national shared tradition."
CBS reported that Roman and his colleagues examined the light output in 2012 and 2013 in 70 U.S. cities to determine energy patterns. They could only examine snow-free areas though because snow reflects so much light, which is why there are dark spots in the Northeast as well as some other regions.
The brightening of the satellite images is not only limited to the Christmas holiday. Scientists first noticed the brighter images in Cairo and other Muslim countries during the holiday of Ramadan.
image courtesy of NASA shared via Twitter by the Daily Mail Online