The Cities at Night from the ISS program has organized a citizen science campaign to classify images taken of earth by astronauts on the ISS at night: Image overload: Help us, NASA says – CNN.com

The images come from the gallery of 1.8M images in the The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth collection at Johnson Space Center. The campaign is called Project: Dark Skies ISS.

Right now there are around 1,800,000 images at the Johnson Space Center database (The Gateway of the Astronauts). Around 1,200,000 images were taken aboard the ISS (date 02/20/2014). However, the number of classified images is much smaller, and there is no archive of georeferenced images. There is already a project to classify the daytime images (Image detective), but the techniques used in that project are not useful for the classification of nighttime images. The patterns on Earth are not the same during the day and night, which is why another technique is needed to classify these nighttime images.

Our main objective is to study light pollution that comes from cities. We want to stop the waste of energy and the destruction of the mighty ecosystem.

Your collaboration is really important because algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities, and other objects (i.e. moon). Thus, we need your help to assess the light pollution in our world!

For more information, please contact www.citiesatnight.org or Twitter handle: @cities4tnight.

Also you can contribute on our other apps Lost at night (find unlocated images) and NightCitiesISS (Georeference known cities). Also you can track the project’s updates at our blog.

This CNN video shows a sample of earth images in the gallery: