Since the 1960s, NASA has accumulated 1.8 million photos from various missions and sources that it now needs help analyzing and placing into context. Volunteers have already catalogued 20,000 photos, according to CNN, but without a greater public interest, cataloguing the 1.8 million photos (and counting) would likely never happen. If you want to be a part of the cataloguing efforts, you can view the images at The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.
You can help the project led by NASA and The Complutense University of Madrid in three ways:
- Dark Skies ISS: Identify pictures of cities, stars or other objects.
- Night Cities ISS: Identify/confirm images of the city in which you live or that you might know based on personal knowledge of how your city looks at night from above.
- Lost at Night: aptly named for the difficulty of the task at hand: Identifying cities in photos with 310-mile circumferences
If you want to help, click on any of the project links above to read more and try to identify what you can. If only half of our readers contributed to cataloguing one photo each, the job would be done!
