tpfi

tpfi is an easy-to-use visualization tool for astronomers to identify and analyze stars in the Kepler, K2, and TESS missions. The main focus of this project is on two functions: plot_identification and plot_season. These functions create plots to help visualize target stars and their surrounding environments.

Plot identification charts for Kepler, K2 and TESS.

The plot_identification function creates identification charts, which are useful for determining if a target is contaminated by nearby stars. In each chart, the right panel overlays the Gaia DR3 catalog onto the TESS Target Pixel Files (TPF) with the target marked by a cross symbol. The circle size represents the relative brightness of the stars according to Gaia G magnitude. The left panel displays the same sky coverage but taken from the DSS2 Red survey.

This function is revised based on tpfplotter.

Plot season charts for Kepler targets.

The Kepler Space Telescope was designed to observe a specific field of stars continuously, but it also needed to ensure its solar panels faced the Sun to power its operations. As Kepler orbited the Sun, it performed a 90-degree roll every three months (or every quarter) to keep its solar panels sunward. After four of these quarterly rolls, amounting to a full year and a complete 360-degree rotation, Kepler would return to its original orientation. Consequently, every set of quarters separated by four (e.g., Q1, Q5, Q9) would find Kepler with the same pointing towards its target field, as the telescope effectively revisited its initial orientation after its annual orbit.

The plot_season function creates a plot of the TPF for each season of the Kepler mission for a given target star. Since the aperture mask may change even in the same season, the function only plots the aperture mask for the first quarter of each season. This function is only applicable for Kepler targets.

Season 1: Q1, Q5, Q9, Q13, Q17

Season 2: Q2, Q6, Q10, Q14

Season 3: Q3, Q7, Q11, Q15

Season 4: Q4, Q8, Q12, Q16

Installation

You can install this package using pip:

pip install tpfi

To upgrade to the latest version, run:

pip install -U tpfi

How to use

See the example notebook for more details.

How to cite

If you use this package in your research, please add the following sentence to the footnote or acknowledgement section of your paper:

This work has made use of \texttt{tpfi} (publicly available at \url{https://github.com/keyuxing/tpfi}).

and cite our paper:

Xing et al., 2024 [ads link][iop link]

Contributing

If you would like to contribute to this project, feel free to submit a pull request or open an issue on GitHub. Any suggestion, improvement, or bug report is welcomed.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.