Cold, wet afternoon? Bored? Wish you could see some pictures of the northern lights? Well read on!

We’re delighted to share an exciting citizen science project with you called “The Auroral Zone“. Scientists from the University of Calgary in Canada need your help classifying thousands of images of the northern lights.

The Auroral Zone homepage

The images have been captured by all-sky cameras from right across Canada and your classifications will help the scientists identify if an aurora is present and, more importantly, exactly what type of aurora it is. We recommend that you run through the tutorial first, but once you’ve done that and signed up, you can start classifying:

Classify aurora images with Auroral Zone.

Look carefully at each image presented and select any of the options that apply. You’ll be helping scientists with their auroral research as well as getting to look through some truly spectacular images of our favourite natural phemonenon. Oh and there’s a leaderboard too 😉

We hope that you will help these guys out and that your contributions will lead to some exciting aurora discoveries. We may even be able to contribute our own photos in the future, once our camera is up and running.

On a related note, we’ll soon be making some changes to our AuroraWatch.Net website to bring you more of these exciting aurora-related projects. More information on that when it’s up and running.

So what are you waiting for? Go classify!