The document discusses a citizen science initiative called 'Night Knights,' which uses gaming to raise awareness about light pollution and engage a wider audience in research efforts. Players participate in a multiplayer game that involves classifying nighttime images captured by astronauts on the International Space Station, contributing to light pollution measurement while having fun. Additionally, it mentions an upcoming public competition encouraging student involvement with incentives, including the chance to join an expedition for a total solar eclipse.

1. Night Knights:
exploiting games to engage people
in a citizen science campaign
Irene Celino – CEFRIEL – @iricelino
Esteban González Guardia – UPM – @eglezguardia
Roma, February 1st 2017

2. How many of you haven’t seen anything
like this in a long time (…or ever)?
This is a view from Tenerife
Canary islands have a special legislation to
protect sky darkness at night
Preserving The Skies
10th Anniversary of the Starlight Declaration
La Palma, Spain – April 18-21
http://www.iac.es/congreso/preservingskies2017/

3. Light pollution: should you really care?
Excessive light at night has a number of adverse effects:
 Diminished night sky visibility, because of light scattering
(i.e. you can’t see the stars anymore, especially from cities)
 Negative repercussion on the circadian clock of higher vertebrates,
including humans (i.e. you don’t sleep well at night)
 Interference with life and reproduction of many species
(e.g. birds loosing their orientation while migrating because they
get confused by city lights)
 Energy waste for unshielded outdoor lights (i.e. economic impact)

4. Creating awareness through games
Not everybody is equally appealed by an awareness creation
campaign, it requires consciousness!
We are exploring a different kind of incentive to engage a possibly
larger audience: fun through games
In the mean time, we are solving an issue related to light pollution
research, to take a step forward to detection and measurement of
the phenomenon

5. Light pollution as seen from above
Astronauts on board of the
International Space Station (ISS) take a
lot of pictures as part of their activity
NASA makes all those pictures available
for free use online
Still we need to tell the pictures we
need (i.e. cities at night) apart from all
other photos
Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti taking pictures
from the ISS windows during her space service

6. Stars and completely black images
(to calibrate light pollution measures)
Classifying ISS pictures
Cities at night
(primary objective)
Aurora borealis ISS Daylight or mixed

7. Night Knights www.nightknights.eu
 Game with a Purpose, i.e. pure gaming application that
“hides” a computational task
 Users play to achieve the game goals, but their actions
contribute to the solution of the ISS image classification issue
 Game mood related to astronauts, spaceship crew,
countdown to lift-off, space mission, etc.
 Multilingual Web application with responsive design to be
easily played on mobile devices

8. Night Knights gameplay www.nightknights.eu
Double-player mechanism with
1-minute game timer
Goal to pick the same category
for each picture
Gain points for agreements
 from agreements between
players we can derive the
pictures’ “true” classification
(cross-validation)

9. Night Knights incentives www.nightknights.eu
 Personal profile and
leaderboards (all time and
last 10 games best players)
 Badges for specific game
achievements
 Access to and download of
the most beautiful pictures
you played with

10. Competition and “tangible” reward
 On April 3rd, STARS4ALL will launch a public competition for active
participation to our initiatives to fight light pollution
 Participants will be undergraduate students and will be required to
demonstrate their contributions to our cause, including playing to
the Night Knights game
 NASA, ESA and other institutions will help us spread the word
 And the winner will participate to next summer expedition to the
total solar eclipse in Idaho (USA)

11. STARS4ALL expeditions and broadcasting
of astronomical events http://www.sky-live.tv/
STARS4ALL YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIYulJmvihMGfRB2SsUkDpQ

12. Thanks for your attention! www.stars4all.eu
Irene Celino – CEFRIEL – @iricelino
Esteban González Guardia – UPM – @eglezguardia