The photos with this story are identified, but the world's scientists say they need help identifying thousands more to help save energy, improve HEALTH AND SAFETY, and better understand of the atmosphere.

Now available at the NASA WEBSITE The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth are more than 1.3 million PHOTOGRAPHS taken from the International Space Station and nearly 500,000 taken by satellites.The site also has beautiful videos like the Bangkok-to-the-Pacific video below and a link to the live video feed from the space station.

New techniques have allowed scientists to take clear images even with a camera orbiting the Earth, but the location in each PHOTOGRAPH may be a mystery. Scientists know where the station or satellite was when the picture was taken, but maybe not which way the camera was pointed.

With NASA's cooperation, the Complutense UNIVERSITY of Madrid is leading a crowd-sourcing project called Cities at Night to catalog the images. It has three parts: Dark Skies of ISS, Night Cities and Lost at Night. Dark Skies, the simplest of the three, asks citizens to help identify points in the pictures and match them with maps. So far, 20,000 have been identified.

What can identification mean? Colors in night images could allow estimates of light sources and, thus, ENERGY EFFICIENCY. Light pollution and road and public safety lighting can also be studied. 

Quelle: AL