Kepler data analyses often begin with establishing which pixels your target of interest occupied, and to what extent artifacts or background signals affect those pixels. The Kepler/K2 in-house toolkit, Lightkurve, offers a new mechanism to witness — in real time — the differential impact of aperture mask pixel selection on the …
more ...The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) observed the K2 Campaign 16 and 17 fields contemporaneously from the ground with its wide field imager. All the images from these Pan-STARRS data are available as a new High Level Science Product at the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST …
more ...Researchers have recently characterized the Intra-Pixel Response Function (IPRF) of a Kepler flight spare CCD. Recent Center for Imaging Science PhD recipient Dmitry Vorobiev presented the study at the SPIE meeting on Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation in Austin, Texas in June 2018. The findings are posted on ArXiV and will …
more ...The Kepler spacecraft recently executed a short pilot program to demonstrate the acquisition of unique calibration data using a new, experimental data collection mode that requires no extra fuel. On May 10-11, 2018, during the K2 Campaign 17 (C17) Deep Space Network (DSN) downlink, the spacecraft collected and downlinked five …
more ...The new lightkurve Python package
for Kepler and K2 data analysis, which we first announced in March,
contains a new feature: interact().
The tool strives to solve a common stumbling block in Kepler data analysis:
"I see a blip in my lightcurve. Is it real or instrumental?"
interact() alleviates the …
The deadline for 2-page Campaign 16 Director's Discretionary Time (DDT) proposals is August 31, 2017. The DDT program welcome requests for exceptional, time-critical observing opportunities of targets that have not already been included in the preliminary target list for K2 Campaign 16.
Notable targets in the Campaign 16 field include …
more ...K2 Campaign 16 (Dec 7 - Feb 25) will be "forward-facing", making possible contemporaneous ground-based observations from Earth. Many teams have now secured telescope time to provide polychromatic photometry and spectroscopy of the field during the Campaign, e.g. for the benefit of the K2 Supernova Cosmology Experiment as well as …
more ...
Kepler & K2 