European project · Space

Lost at Night

Locate night-time photos of Earth taken from the International Space Station on a map

About the project

Lost at Night is a citizen science platform for georeferencing night-time photographs of Earth taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The photos come from NASA’s archive (the Astronaut Photography of Earth Database). They arrive with plenty of information (camera, focal length, expedition, the Station’s position) but without their exact footprint on the ground. To use them as scientific data, each photo has to be aligned with its geographical coordinates, so that every pixel matches a point on the planet.

Volunteers mark the same feature (a coastline, a river, a lit-up town) in the photo and on the map. Each pair is a control point: at least three are needed, and seven well-spread points are recommended. Each image is georeferenced independently by several people to validate the result.

Lost at Night was born within Cities at Night, the project coordinated by researcher Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel. Since 2024, Ibercivis’s development and maintenance of the platform has been funded by the European project PLAN-B.

Project history

2010-2011. Astronaut Soichi Noguchi posts night-time photos taken from the ISS on social media. Alejandro Sánchez de Miguel and Jaime Zamorano see their scientific value and propose calibrating them to NASA, but the images have no location: this is how the idea of Cities at Night is born.
First apps. With volunteers from the MediaLab Prado hackathon and the Citizen Science Summit in London, the first apps for classifying and locating the photos are created; Lost at Night is the one for placing them on the map.
2018. A crowdfunding campaign to design and maintain the Cities at Night apps, promoted by Ibercivis.
2019. Lost at Night is up and running at lostatnight.org.
2020. A new version of the app, thanks to the Stars4all campaign, support from FECYT and the involvement of Ibercivis, which also publishes a teaching unit for secondary schools (see the page for that stage).
2024. Ibercivis develops the current platform, with georeferencing by control points, challenges and teams, as part of PLAN-B.

Project objectives

To build, with the help of the public, a global map of Earth’s night-time lights to measure light pollution and track how it changes.

Georeference the ISS night-time photographs with precise geographical coordinates.
Create a global database of night-time light patterns.
Support studies on the impact of artificial light on ecosystems and human health.
Publish the validated data openly (CC BY-SA licence) for research.

The role of Ibercivis

Ibercivis is a member of the PLAN-B consortium. It has developed the Lost at Night platform and keeps it running, and organises workshops and activities so that more people can take part.

Our activities

Development and maintenance of the platform, with regional challenges (Spain, Europe, France, Poland and Brazil 2026-27) and teams so that classes, clubs or groups of friends can take part together. The georeferencing code is open source (gdalface on GitHub).
PLAN-B online workshop (21 May 2026): around fifty people placed 2,500 control points in a single session, 80% of the 3,000 target.
Workshops with secondary schools in Melilla (April 2026), together with Openred and ECHO.
Open day at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Villanueva de la Cañada (3 October 2026): visitors of all ages georeferenced ISS photos.

As of 18 October 2026, the community had placed 36,859 control points and georeferenced 2,003 photographs, with 146 participants.