In pictures: Flight paths around the world

They look like slashes of lightning painted across the sky or white-hot jolts of electricity burning their way around the globe, or even a startling reminder of the world-wide issues of air pollution. Any way you see them, Michael Markieta's stunning visualizations of global flight paths are incredible.

Michael Markieta, a transportation planner working with Arup's Toronto office, has spent the past year developing images of flight paths crossing the globe to better understand patterns of globalisation and intercity connectivity.

After finding the data at open-source project openflights.org, Markieta began to work on visualisations in his spare time. He hopes that the project will prove useful to researchers in various fields needing to understand more about global connectivity, such as epidemiologists who use information about cross-national movement to track the spread of disease.

Have a look at more of this amazing images below:

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For more out of this world imagery have a look at an astronaut's views of the earth from space:

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