Light pollution isn’t just an issue on Earth: For astronauts peering out an International Space Station window, city lights appear brighter than stars.
To tackle the problem of artificial light in the night sky, the European Space Agency (ESA) is calling on citizen scientists to help identify images of metropolitan areas taken from the cosmos.
NASA’s Astronaut Photography of Earth archives are brimming with high-resolution pictures of our planet from dusk to dawn. Most snapshots, however, are uncatalogued and don’t have an assigned location.
Enter Lost at Night, a project that raises awareness of light pollution.
More than 30,000 images have been classified by volunteers. But more help is required to complete the puzzle.
ESA astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti on the International Space Station in February 2015 (via ESA/NASA)
“We don’t know which direction the astronauts pointed the camera from the Station,” lead project investigator Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel, a research fellow at the University of Exeter, said in a statement. “We only know the time it was taken and the area of Earth they were flying over.”
The Lost at Night website invites people to help find the best match for each problem picture; simply follow the instructions to pair lit-up cities within a 620-mile range.
“Forget about playing Candy Crush in idle times,” Sánchez de Miguel said. “This is a great opportunity to learn about geography, the distribution of human activity, and how your home town looks like from space.”
Plus, it’s much more mind-bendingly difficult than the colorful match-three puzzle game.
People make mistakes, though. So this initiative requires input from five users per image to reduce the margin of error. From there, artificial intelligence takes over.
The objective is to identify 90,000 images—enough to train AI to automatically recognize a collection of pixels and locate images.
To tackle light pollution, citizen scientists are urged to help map out the problem on their smartphones by identifying images of cities taken from space (via Lost at Night)
Artificial light has a broad range of impacts on the biological clock of nocturnal and diurnal species. Light changes, according to ESA, lead to knock-on effects that can impact entire ecosystems—from plant flowering times to migration disruptions for birds and turtles.
Bright nights also affect people’s sleep and can negatively impact health.
“While computer algorithms have trouble distinguishing between stars, the Moon, and cities, people are more reliable when it comes to recognizing patterns and analyzing complex images,” Sánchez de Miguel said.
There are numerous scientific projects associated with images taken from the ISS, captured in the inhabitants’ free time from the seven-window Cupola observation module.
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