NASA Needs Your Help Identifying Almost 2 Million Images of Earth From Space

Since the 1950's, NASA has taken 1.8 million images of the Earth from space - 1.3 million of which have been captured from aboard the ISS.

As part of the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, NASA is releasing its massive library of images. In return, its asking the public to help identify the locations depicted in the images. While some of the snapshots are clear, many are partially obscured or taken at night, which makes it incredibly difficult for a computer program to work out what they are of.

The public is being asked to help with the "dark skies", "night cities", or "lost at night" projects, each featuring images incredibly difficult to decode. Identifying towns and cities from space is not all that easy if you don't have a solid knowledge of the area. Take, for instance, the picture above which shows the Las Vegas strip at night. If you had never been to Las Vegas or only had a limited knowledge with it, it would take a great deal of time to work out what that picture was showing. That's why NASA wants to utilize the knowledge of locals to help them pinpoint the locations held within their massive photo archive.

Each section will feature a sliding scale of difficulty. So while you may start out with an image like the one below, showing the iconic Manhattan island....

....your next task could be something like this (Spoiler: it's Lima, Peru)

Get started on this incredible puzzle here

See the galleries of already categorized pictures here