For my citizen science project I decided to participate in a project named Cities at Night. Cities at Night is a project created to archive photos taken from the International Space Station so that they can be sorted, and the photos of cities and the light given off by them can be studied and used for future research. As an avid stargazer who owns a few different telescopes, the problem of light pollution has plagued me for a long time. Living in the city during school and close to it the rest of the year causes light pollution to significantly impact the amount of observations I can make using the telescopes I have. Being so affected by light pollution cause me to want to take part in this project and make more aware of the problems connected to light pollution.
Light pollution causes more problems than you may think. The average person seems to boil down light pollution to the simple issue of not being able to see the stars at night. Although this is a huge and quite depressing problem, one that causes us not to enjoy the nature around us, this is not the only dilemma. Light pollution also causes severe complications on the ecosystem and our health making it a pressing issue that must be dealt with.
The premise of this project was very simple, look at a given picture, and then categorize it based on predetermined categories the picture may fall under.
As you can see with the picture below, the image is shown underneath the different categories. The categories you can place the picture in are: Black, City, Stars, Aurora, Astronaut, None of these, No photo, and I don’t know. When selecting City more categories are then shown.
You first are asked to determine how much cloud cover there is with you options being: Clear, Some clouds, and Cloudy.
Prior to this the program asks you if the image is Sharp or Blurry as seen in the next picture.
I took part in this project for the full month of November, trying to archive some pictures at least a few times a week. The project was very easy to take part in. Simply categorizing the pictures does not require that much mental capacity so I was able to participate at random times when I might not have been feeling that intellectual. This project is also extremely accessible, solely requiring the link and a few clicks to help out. In addition to all this the project is very interesting. You are sorting through some of the coolest pictures of space and our home planet and cities from a perspective not usually looked at.
During the duration of when I was participating in the project all the pictures the site contained were successfully archived. You can continue to categorize pictures, which will wind up being the same that some already categorized but they allow this to reduce error. In addition to this there are some further steps that can be taken. The first is an application called Lost at Night where you can take the pictures marked as a city and try to help determine which city is actually being represented in the photo. After this you can access an eve further step with the Georeferencing Cities application where you associate a physical map with spatial locations to the picture. Although most of my time was spent doing the categorizing, the other tasks are just as interesting although a tad more complicated.
All of these tasks help the organization running this project measure and compare large illuminated areas. With the colors of the images the efficiency of lighting in many cities on the planet can be measured, helping us learn a ton of information on light pollution.
Overall participating in this citizen science project was very rewarding. Not only was it intriguing to look at and categorize the pictures, it felt like I was doing the planet a justice. Hopefully this study continues and brings more awareness to the issues of light pollution, but for now I will be taking my telescopes upstate to the mountains to get away from the light.
