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zkbt / thefriendlystars

Python toolkit for making finder charts with catalogs that cover a small patch of the sky.
MIT License
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Get light curves for all stars! #3

Open zkbt opened 6 months ago

zkbt commented 6 months ago

It would be great to be able to get and plot light curves for as many stars as possible in the field of view. I think the way to approach this is to get a table of stars with get_gaia (see here), and then use lightkurve to ask for TESS light curves of the stars brighter than a certain brightness threshold.

Some early steps:

@Autumn10677 , this is way too short of a description. Please let me know where you get stuck!

zkbt commented 6 months ago

https://docs.lightkurve.org/

zkbt commented 6 months ago

Very commented code playing with part of this here: https://gist.github.com/zkbt/9c99459ffe82d05f9e55658f47956ca0

zkbt commented 6 months ago

Awesome work you've been making on this, @Autumn10677 ! We should start talking about how to package up what you have into a handy function that could be pushed up here to use alongside get_gaia and plot_gaia!

zkbt commented 6 months ago

One (possibly silly and not worth the effort but maybe a fun) matplotlib coding challenge would be to try to have a way to display the light curves locally on the finder chart, like drawing a tiny light curve plot at the location of each star for which one has been downloaded. For example, it might end up looking something like this (again, probably mostly only focusing on the brightest stars):

Rainbows-6

Practically, to make this work, it's probably easiest to define some conversion between the "x = time" and "y = flux" of a light curve and the "x = projected right ascension offset" and "y = declination offset" of the finder chart, and then plot the light curves using those converted coordinates one by one on top of the finder chart?

zkbt commented 6 months ago

I think the above silly visualization idea might be a big enough thing that we should just spin it off into its own GitHub Issue. I think a minimal thing to finish to call this particular Issue #3 finished might be to add little labels with numbers/letters/names/IDs next to each star on the finder and then label the (normal, straightforwardly plotted) light curves to match.

zkbt commented 6 months ago

Or, honestly, to call this Issue closed, let's please just push some well-documented code in a function that can download light curves for some subset of a get_gaia output, and make them available for whatever visualization or calculations afterward!