Crowdsourcing Night Sky Images
The space agency NASA needs your help to search through more than 1.8 million photos of the Earth taken during dozens of missions, from the Mercury missions of the 1960s to images captured by the International Space Station.
According to NASA, the pictures “could help save energy, contribute to better human health and safety and improve our understanding of atmospheric chemistry.”
The images form part of the Gateway to Astronaut Photography which holds “the best and most complete online collection of astronaut photographs of the Earth.” Some of the shots are blurry, as before 2003 astronauts had to manually track pictures on the fast moving space station.
The crowdsourcing project is being headed up by the Complutense University of Madrid and is called Cities at Night.
Many of the pictures were taken at night and the space agency needs the human touch to discern things that algorithms cannot. They have been divided into three areas:
Dark Skies
Sorting the photographs into categories: cities, stars or other objects.
Night Cities
NASA is hoping that people can use their knowledge of local geography to map photos with specific locations.
Lost at Night
This is the most difficult challenge for participants as scientists can’t tell from the images where the camera was pointed, only where the space station was at the time the astronaut took the image.
To date, members of the public have helped to classify close to 20,000 photos.
One way that this research can help is with studying light pollution. By examining the colors of the images taken by astronauts, scientists can measure the efficiency of lighting in numerous cities. This could then feed into new ways of conserving energy.
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