You're about to do the real job behind the search: telling real planets apart from false alarms in NASA telescope data.
3 quick practice rounds — we teach you the shapes to look for.
Then you're on real TESS light curves — actual stars, scored against known answers.
Takes seconds each. No account needed. New to this? Keep the Field Guide handy.
A planet crossing its star makes a tiny, repeating dip in the star's brightness. Your eyes catch things the software misses.
The Search — Data Lab
You're shown a light curve — a star's brightness measured over time by NASA's TESS planet-hunting telescope. A planet crossing its star makes a tiny, repeating dip. Your job: tell a real planet from noise, a glitch, or two stars eclipsing each other. Real cards use real TESS data and each has a known answer, so your accuracy is measured for real.
🎯 Mono-Transit Hunt — hunt the planets that cross their star just once. Automated pipelines search for repeating dips, so they throw single transits away — but human eyes catch them, and they're the #1 thing citizen scientists find. Spot the lone dip, or call it noise. (Training signals — practicing the catch that matters most.)exit hunt
Light curve #1
Practice
time →← brightness
Is there a real planet transiting this star?
Tap a button below — or on a phone, swipe → for planet, ← for not a planet.
Your measured performance
Cards vetted
0
Accuracy vs. known truth
—
Planets caught (recall)
0 / 0
False alarms avoided
0 / 0
Current streak
0
★ Sharp Eye — 9/10 correct on real cards
Why this is real science: no single answer decides anything. In the live project, each light curve is shown to many people; the crowd's agreement — checked against hidden known-answer cards like these — is what flags a candidate for a professional to follow up. We also hide faint injected planets in real starlight (an injection–recovery test) to measure exactly what fraction the crowd catches. That's how we know it works, in numbers. Open the Field Guide →