How to Turn Off Earth City Lights in Google Earth

Last Updated: June 20, 2021

Do you use Google Earth to look at the world's buildings, but all you see now is just a world of black at times (when viewing at night)? You might have accidentally turned on a feature that causes it to turn everything the way a NASA scientist would see the world from space? Learn how to turn this feature back off, after reading this article.

Steps

1
Open Google Earth.Wait for the Google Earth service to initialize and self-login (no Google login required).
2
Look down towards the bottom left hand corner of the screen for an area called "Layer". Scroll through the "Layer" list until you come to a "Gallery" option. Click the "+" icon that is to the left of the word. This should open a drop-down list.

Advertisement
3
Scroll through the list to find "NASA". Click the + button to the left of it's name.
4
Scroll through the list and find "Earth City Lights". Again, click the "+" icon. (On most recent updates of Google Earth, this should automatically expand by default.)
5
Click the radio-checkbox to the left of "Information" to turn this feature off.

Advertisement