Since 2003, astronauts aboard the International Space Station have captured more than 1.3 million photos of Earth. They're beautiful, and many of them are the highest-resolution nighttime photos ever taken from orbit, but there's one problem: What the photographs show, exactly, is unclear. Which is why NASA hopes you can provide the answers.
With a project called Cities at Night, a group of scientists from Spain are turning to crowdsourcing, asking anyone interested to plot these images on a map. There are three parts to the project. First, Dark Skies ISS, which asks people to sort the images by content such cities, stars, and other objects. Second is Night Skies ISS, for plotting the points of light in images on a map. Third is Lost at Night, which asks users to plot locations within the images on a map.
The project as a whole is intended to fight light pollution. The Cities at Night project leaders say that building this user-created map of city lights will show governments just how bad the light pollution problem is in any particular location. The color of the light also can give away its source. And the database could show governments how light pollution adversely affects things like economic efficiency and public health.
Rachel Z. Arndt is the author of the essay collection Beyond Measure. Her writing has appeared in Quartz, The Believer, Fast Company, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago.
