Lost at Night

In 2014 I worked with a reseracher from Madrid, Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel, who wanted to create a citizen science project. The project aim was to classify all pictures taken by astronauts from the International Space Station in order to study the light pollution at cities.

The project started at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit as a prototype as a collaboration with the UCM group of Extragalactic Astrophysics and Astronomical Instrumentation.

Then, it continued as part of a workshop at Medialab-Prado: Madrid Laboratorio Urbano.

This project became one of the most popular projects in our now defunct Crowdcrafting crowdsourcing platform, with more than 100 thousand tasks, and storing in one single day more than 80 thousand answers thanks to the volunteers.

The project received official support from NASA, ESA, ISS, etc. and it was been featured on prime time on FOX tv. These are some tweets about the project:

Space station sharper images of Earth at night crowdsourced for science: http://t.co/bHBiLwvZSv #ISS pic.twitter.com/bL9LymQ6cq

— NASA (@NASA) agosto 14, 2014

Did you catch @cities4tnight and @crowdcrafting on @FOXTV last week? If not: https://t.co/QJHS5yyRAJ #FOXTV #lightpollution #crowdsourcing

— Crowdcrafting (@crowdcrafting) agosto 27, 2014

#Citizenscience at work RT @teleyinex: @esa thanks to your help on Twitter @cities4tnight has 3000 tasks classified in @crowdcrafting

— ESA (@esa) julio 10, 2014

Citizen Science with Night Images http://t.co/xEwnPqhLkE #NASA pic.twitter.com/FcKAu0C4zB

— NASA Earth (@NASA_EO) agosto 30, 2014

Due to the success of this project, we created a special web page where we used audio from the Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 missions to showcase this amazing project. The reason? Well, photography has been always played a key role in this field, and during the landing on the moon the astronauts chat about which camera and lenses they want to use. If you want to experience it, I highly recommend you to go to https://lostatnight.daniellombrana.es and enjoy it.

For more information, visit the offial project page.