Chris Lintott, FRAS, is best known as the co-presenter, with Patrick Moore, of The Sky at Night, first appearing on the programme in 2000. He studied Natural Sciences at Magdalene College Cambridge, and received a PhD in  astrochemistry of star formation at University College, London. He then took a research position the University of Oxford and ran the team responsible for Galaxy Zoo, a project which engaged hundreds of thousands of people in the task of classifying galaxies. For the last year he has been but is currently spending a year at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. At Adler he works as Citizen Science Project Lead expanding the range and depth of opportunities for everyone to contribute to scientific research. Away from academia, his interests are theatrical, whether writing for the Royal Opera's Ring Cycle programmes to producing Patrick Moore's comic opera, Galileo, which bemused audiences from Cambridge to Chichester and beyond.

Chris will be talking about Planet Hunters. 'Planet Hunters' is the latest citizen science project from Zooniverse. A chance for anyone to get involved in hunting for new planets. Participants help sieve through data taken by the NASA Kepler space mission. The data consists of brightness measurements, or "light curves," taken every thirty minutes for more than 150,000 stars. Users search for possible transit events - a brief dip in brightness that occurs when a planet passes in front of the star - with the goal of discovering a planet (hence the name "Planet Hunters"). The most difficult detections for Planet Hunters and for computer-based searches will be those from planets that orbit far from their star and therefore cross the star infrequently. It may also be difficult for computer algorithms to detect planets in data that has artificial offsets (which can occur with telescope pointing errors or space craft rolls). Planet Hunter participants may be better than computers at finding signals in this type of data. Because of the outstanding pattern recognition of the human brain, it is hoped that participants will also establish new "families" or classifications for the light curves.