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LSST-nonproject / sims_maf_contrib

Contributed code for MAF (sims_maf)
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Added custom "Variability Depth Metric" #27

Closed keatonb closed 8 years ago

keatonb commented 8 years ago

Hey! I wrote a metric. This should give a sense of how deep in magnitude LSST will be able to detect low-amplitude variable stars.

yoachim commented 8 years ago

sweet!

Can you update the ipython notebook so that it runs the metric, maybe with a HealpixSlicer? It'd be nice to see how it looks. Also, is this a metric that should be run in only one filter? We have some simple stellar color templates if you want to try to generalize to doing variability across filters.

keatonb commented 8 years ago

Alright, I've run the metric in the notebook. For 10 years, in the r band alone, we'll detect 1% variability with 95% completeness and 5% (loosely defined) contamination to r=19 in the main survey.

But you make a great point that we're not only going to look in one filter to detect variability. Extending this to all filters requires color templates and (to a lesser degree) an understanding of the dependence of variability amplitude with color.

Do you have white dwarf color templates built in? This metric is applicable to all stars, but I'm particularly interested in the white dwarfs.

rhiannonlynne commented 8 years ago

We don't currently have white dwarf color templates built in, just main sequence stars, in some metrics. We will add an issue to extend the color templates to main sequence stars and make the colors available more widely (probably add it in sims_maf.utils).