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ISS Earth at Night Photos Crowdsourced For Science

Posted by samzenpus on from the worth-a-thousand-words dept.

teleyinex writes The Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) is leading a project called Cities at Night to catalog the images taken by astronauts from the ISS. The project uses the platform Crowdcrafting powered by the open source software PyBossa to catalog images in cities, stars or other objects, as well as geo-reference them."

13 comments

  1. "...catalog images AS cities, stars or..." by jeffb+(2.718) · · Score: 2

    I'm intrigued. This project seems like a more engaging and worthwhile use of my time than the crowdsourced editing of Slashdot summaries.

    1. Re:"...catalog images AS cities, stars or..." by teleyinex · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thanks ;-) I'm the lead developer of Crowdcrafting and its technology PyBossa where you can contribute not only to this amazing project, but others like Rural Geolocator developed by the Public Health Computing group at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute in Basel. Rural Geolocator is geo-referencing houses to fight Malaria, so if you are tired of really amazing pictures from ISS join us also in that project. It's pretty helpful and amazing too :-) Cheers, Daniel PS: Note PyBossa is open-source :D

    2. Re:"...catalog images AS cities, stars or..." by danknight48 · · Score: 1

      Shame it isnt C++Bossa.
      Myself and Python have a disagreement with performance.

  2. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's some amazing science and space exploration there!

    1. Re:Wow by teleyinex · · Score: 1

      Thanks to you for your time helping! Crowdcrafting has many more projects, so if you get tired of watching amazing pictures from the ISS, choose another one, or even better create your own!

      Cheers,

      Daniel

  3. Py* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can't take any software seriously which, just because it is written in (the awful) Python, starts with "Py". It'd be like my prepending "C+" to all my C++ apps.

    Secondly, are these cameras really taking photos without the time, location and orientation of the camera automatically recorded? I realise that the privatisation of space travel has meant work coming nearly to a halt since the fall of civilisation in Russia, but this is disappointing.

    1. Re:Py* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The lack of time and location is the least of their concerns. The images are so blurry that you can't even make anything out. Really, you'd think they could spring for an SLR or something that could do a better job.

  4. Where's the numbers by Stumbles · · Score: 1

    Melissa at NASA says more than "...taken by astronauts on the station are the highest-resolution night imagery available from orbit...", really? Is the resolution better than 1.3nm? Till that is given this is nothing more than puffery on their part.

    --
    My karma is not a Chameleon.
    1. Re:Where's the numbers by wonkey_monkey · · Score: 1

      Melissa at NASA says more than "...taken by astronauts on the station are the highest-resolution night imagery available from orbit..."

      What?

      [kde.org], really?

      What?

      Is the resolution better than 1.3nm?

      At the risk of repeating myself... what?

      --
      systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
    2. Re: Where's the numbers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The resolution is better than 10 m in some images. The next satellite dedicated to night observation and free access has a resolution of 750 m. These images has 14 b of dinamic range, the VIIRS 12 b. The CMOS sensor of the camera is better than the Photomultiplier of the VIIRS. And the DSLR has 3 channels, VIIRS is pancromatic.

  5. Always fascinating by JaneTheIgnorantSlut · · Score: 1

    Back when the shuttle was flying and NASA-TV covered the missions, if the crew was sleeping they would often just point the camera at the ground and broadcast that feed. It is a lot harder to identify a part of the earth than you might think, especially when you don't have a good idea of which direction is North.