Facebook data infrastructure engineering team intern, Paul Butler, has made a beautiful infographic mapping friendships through plotting their coordinates and connections… and what lit up looks a lot like the Earth At Night!

Butler’s goal? “One that piqued my curiosity was the locality of friendship. I was interested in seeing how geography and political borders affected where people lived relative to their friends. I wanted a visualization that would show which cities had a lot of friendships between them.” And how did he do it? “I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.”

See close ups, as well as comparisons between his infographic and the Earth at Night on the next page…