I too was perplexed by the lights in Western Australia, as well as those mentioned by others. I downloaded one of the large versions of this image and cut and pasted two portions of the Australian part of the image into a new pic for comparison. Here it is...
![OZ.jpg](./download/file.php?id=8174&sid=298a7d700e426eeac7a6d68cad632855)
- OZ.jpg (9.6 KiB) Viewed 1735 times
The left half of my image shows the most southern large blob of light in the Western Desert of Australia, approximately over the Neale Junction Nature Reserve. The right part of my image shows the area around the city of Melbourne. There are over 4 million people in Melbourne, but probably just a few hundred in that Western Desert blob. (My bits were copied from the same image at the same scale.)
The NASA image is "a composite assembled from data acquired ... over nine days in April 2012 and thirteen days in October 2012." Unless there was some vast network of wildfires that just happened to happen in that period, there is something else shown here. There are large mines in Western Australia, and no doubt some exploration as well, but the amount of light shown seems, well, implausible.
Wikipedia says, on its
Bushfires in Australia page, "In the southwest ... bushfires occur in the summer dry season and severity is usually related to seasonal growth." The summer dry season in Australia is December through March.
Rob