A guide or tool to fetch all historical photometry of a given target

[gully]

Description

Beyond Kepler/K2, many projects have collected and/or continue to collect time series photometry of large swaths of the sky over various timespans. Many of these projects are publicly available, for example:

• ASASSN
• SuperWASP
• Integral-OMG
• ASAS
• AAVSO

and many more. It would be useful to have, most simply, a list of these data sources to assist researchers interested in combining all available photometry of a target through time. Beyond the list, it would be useful to have a system for combining the raw data (in various formats), into "flat files" (date, time, time standard, instrument, band, flux, flux error). Many researchers must have built tooling to do this, but there is no clear public code.

Benefits

• Makes historical data more visible and accessible
• Simplifies access to disparate surveys
• Brings all available information to bear on a problem of interest
• Puts K2 data in context of longer timescale variability
• Option for serendipitous discoveries from archival data

Costs

• Not all photometric systems are standardized, so inter-comparisons may be misleading
• Not all objects appear in all surveys, so need some resilience to missing data
• Many surveys have large pixels, causing contamination that might not be present in K2 data
• Survey sensitivities are limited, so most interesting comparisons will be for high-amplitude variables

[JeffLCoughlin]

Great idea. Checked the MAST portal for HAT-P-& (KIC 10666592) and although Kepler, Galex, and a few others show up, none of the photometry surveys like HATNet, WASP, etc. show up.

I wonder if it's worth talking to MAST about this to see if they are planning on incorporating these into MAST anytime soon? If so seems to be a more ideal solution for the community if they are.

[JeffLCoughlin]

Follow-up. We talked to MAST this morning. They might have some of these data sets in their Virtual Observator (VO) but they weren't sure which ones. They said it was more likely NExScI had the data as that was NExScI's role (to archive these data). Even then it might be sparse though as not all these groups delivered all data completely or consistenetly. MAST was very encouraging of anyone asking these groups to deliver their data to the MAST VO which would then make them easily retreivable.