Help Science Identify a Kajillion Astronaut Photos of Cities

Want to do a small part to help world science, or just pretend you're an astronaut (wheee!) zooming above Earth at 17,500 mph? Then pound some Tang and head on over to "Cities at Night," an ambitious crowdsourcing effort to sift through an immense mountain of photos shot from space.

Astronauts have been wielding cameras since the 1960s; you can find the 1.8 million images they've captured at the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth. But there's a problem: Though the photos are beautiful and crisp, especially since the 2012 advent of a high-tech tripod that adjusts for earth's rotation and the International Space Station's incredible speed, many lack georeferenced data. That creates a stumbling block to anybody in science, the media, or the general public trying to work with space-based imagery of the world's cities.