"I was a big meteor spotting fan, at school, what I really liked to do was meteor counts. So I would lie in the back garden in December for the Geminids or something with a tape recorder and a piece of string, and when a meteor went past I would call out the time on to the tape and hold a piece of string up and measure the length of the meteor and then we’d write all this down and send it off. It was a way of doing science with nothing except eyes, and so I was hooked at that idea that I could do something in the back garden with really simple equipment that could make a contribution to science. If you look at what I do now, where I spend my day job running websites like Galaxy Zoo that get the public involved in doing science with nothing more than a web browser it’s almost full circle, we’ve gone from being in the back garden with a deck chair and piece of string to a web browser but the principle is still the same."