Many of the pixel masks observed by Kepler contain more than one star. These overlooked background stars potentially present opportunities to find new exoplanet candidates. Most planet search pipelines focus on the primary target in the center of the mask, often ignoring neighbor stars towards the mask edges (exceptions include K2SC, Aigrain et al. 2016). Kepler’s data archive also contains 4,160 extended pixel masks which were observed during Kepler Quarter 5 through 17 to estimate the background Eclipsing Binary rate. These masks have not been searched for planets by the Kepler pipeline. In addition, K2 collected a significant number of extended masks to observe star clusters, galaxies, and moving Solar System object. All these masks contain a significant number of background stars which, to our modest knowledge, have not been analyzed or searched for planets thoroughly. Superstamps from Kepler and K2 can be difficult to work with, due to them being built from a set of smaller tiles. Recently, the Kepler GO office has started to release easier-to-use mosaics of these data (Cody et al. 2018) and tools to cut out small Target Pixel Files from such superstamps (cf. Lightkurve).
Many of the pixel masks observed by Kepler contain more than one star. These overlooked background stars potentially present opportunities to find new exoplanet candidates. Most planet search pipelines focus on the primary target in the center of the mask, often ignoring neighbor stars towards the mask edges (exceptions include K2SC, Aigrain et al. 2016). Kepler’s data archive also contains 4,160 extended pixel masks which were observed during Kepler Quarter 5 through 17 to estimate the background Eclipsing Binary rate. These masks have not been searched for planets by the Kepler pipeline. In addition, K2 collected a significant number of extended masks to observe star clusters, galaxies, and moving Solar System object. All these masks contain a significant number of background stars which, to our modest knowledge, have not been analyzed or searched for planets thoroughly. Superstamps from Kepler and K2 can be difficult to work with, due to them being built from a set of smaller tiles. Recently, the Kepler GO office has started to release easier-to-use mosaics of these data (Cody et al. 2018) and tools to cut out small Target Pixel Files from such superstamps (cf. Lightkurve).