NASA, it has a problem.
The agency has racked up millions of night-time images, taken from space, over the last 50 years.
Mainly shot from the International Space Station (ISS), they aim to measure light pollution and energy consumption across the globe.
But it's difficult to identify the exact location of many of the photographs - so citizens are being called on to help determine which slice of the earth each single picture represents.
It's hoped NASA will then be able to stitch the snaps together to create the ultimate atlas of light pollution and efficiency.
The ' Dark Skies of ISS' crowdsourcing campaign is asking people to sort the shots into three categories - cities, stars and other objects.
A second initiative, called ' Night Cities,' is appealing for earthlings with geographic knowledge of particular areas to identity city features so the photos can be properly positioned on a map.
And the final ' Lost at Night' project calls on citizens to identify cities through just pinpricks of light within a 310 mile circle on the Earth's surface.
'Anyone can help,' Alejandro Sanchez, a Ph.D. student at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) stated in a recent press release.
Claiming that without outside help it would be impossible to use the images scientifically, he said: 'Algorithms cannot distinguish between stars, cities, and other objects, such as the moon.'
And he said crowd participation would be key to cracking the conundrum.
'We don't know which direction the astronaut pointed the camera, only where the station was at the time the image was taken. Some images are bright cities but others are small towns. It is like a puzzle with 300,000 pieces.'
Some 20,000 images have already been classified. But NASA said each image had to be correctly identified multiple times so it was sure the final result was accurate.
The images are available to the public through The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth.
It features snaps taken during the Mercury missions in the early 1960s up to recent images from the ISS.
Entities 0 Name: NASA Count: 3 1 Name: Earth Count: 2 2 Name: Complutense University of Madrid Count: 1 3 Name: ISS Count: 1 4 Name: moon Count: 1 5 Name: NASA NASA Count: 1 6 Name: UCM Count: 1 7 Name: Alejandro Sanchez Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1m8M3IQ Title: Image overload: Help us sort it all out, NASA requests Description: (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.
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