Every 27 days, NASA’s TESS spacecraft completes another orbit, beaming down photometric data from thousands of stars. Hidden within these light curves are the telltale dips that reveal distant worlds—but finding them requires human pattern recognition at scale. The Planet Hunters TESS project harnesses citizen scientists to scan this cosmic haystack, but the default interface can feel clunky when you’re deep in the hunt for planetary transits.
This userscript collection transforms the experience into a streamlined exoplanet discovery workflow. The main script expands light curve viewers, adds intuitive keyboard shortcuts (M for move, A for annotate), and implements mouse wheel zooming that won’t accidentally scroll your browser. More impressively, it auto-generates links between TESS Input Catalog (TIC) numbers and professional databases like ExoMAST and ExoFOP, while providing a transit depth calculator to quickly assess whether those mysterious dips could actually be planet-sized. Companion scripts enhance follow-up research by converting transit epochs from MJD to BTJD and cross-referencing targets across SIMBAD, VSX, and ASAS-SN databases.
Whether you’re a seasoned citizen scientist who’s classified thousands of light curves or a professional astronomer streamlining follow-up observations, these tools eliminate the friction between discovery and verification. In an era where TESS generates more data than any individual can process, every efficiency gain in the human-computer partnership brings us closer to finding the next potentially habitable world.
⭐ Stars: 3
💻 Language: JavaScript
🔗 Repository: orionlee/planet_hunters_tess_userscripts