Help NASA Classify Pix From Space

One of the images from space in large NASA photo collection.
(Image Source: NASA)

By Eliott C. McLaughlin, CNN

NASA is asking for your help.

No, you do not get to go to space.

You do, however, get to view hundreds of thousands of images taken from space. Via The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA is making available images ranging from the Mercury missions of the 1960s to photos recently snapped from the International Space Station.

The Complutense University of Madrid is spearheading efforts to catalog the photos and corral citizen input. It's broken the images into three components requiring different levels of participation:

1. Dark skies. This is the easiest project, as it requires no scientific expertise. "Anyone can help" by sorting the images into the categories: cities, stars or other objects, said Alejandro Sanchez, doctoral student at Complutense.

"Without the help of citizens, it is almost impossible to use these images scientifically. Algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities and other objects, such as the moon. Humans are much more efficient for complex image analysis," he said.

2. Night cities. Looking at night images, citizen scientists can tap their knowledge of local geography to match photos with positions on maps. Residents of a city can more easily identify a city's features than those who don't live there, Sanchez said. The data will be used to generate light maps of cities.

3. Lost at night. This is the trickiest, as it aims to identify cities in photos with 310-mile circumferences.

More - Link >>> http://www.cnn.com/2014/08/17/tech/nasa-earth-images-help-needed/

Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth: Link >>> http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/

Sources: NASA, CNN.

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