A satellite launched in 2011 to study patterns of urban energy use has inadvertently revealed where most holiday lights can be found in the world.

NASA revealed this data as part of a video showing images of the Sun, the Earth, Christmas lights, solar flares, winds and terrestrial storms.

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The video shows large areas mostly outside cities where night lights were 20, 30, and even 50 percent brighter over the holidays because of Christmas lights.

NASA's video confirmed that holiday lights are bright enough to be seen from space. NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) used the VIIRS instrument on the Suomi NPP satellite to study light patterns during Christmas and Ramadan to "provide new insights into how energy consumption behaviors vary across different cultural settings."

NASA's RapidScat instrument also tracked the winds of a storm system that took tornadoes to Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana on Tuesday from aboard the International Space Station. Along with data from NOAA's GOES-East, or Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, NASA created an animation of the storm moving over the U.S. and Central and South America from December 21 to 24.

"People are staying in their homes and celebrating. Or they are traveling to rural areas in the suburbs, and they are turning on the lights, when people in urban centers are turning off the lights. That's because they are going off for the holidays," said NASA researcher Miguel Roman.

They also found diversity in the light data from the Middle East during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.