Introduction

What is phot2lc?

First of all, phot2lc is not a photometry pipeline. Rather, phot2lc is a program that ingests the output from various photometry pipelines and provides users with a set of tools to extract and manipulate divided light curves. It is largely inspired by WQED, and provides functionality such as comparison star selection, aperture size selection, removing poor-quality data, polynomial fitting, and barycentric time corrections.

Currently Supported Photometry Pipelines

phot2lc will not automatically work with photometric data from all pipelines. Each pipeline will produce output with different content and formats, and phot2lc must be configured to properly ingest the data.

Output from the following photometry pipelines is currently supported:

If your preferred photometry pipeline is not listed here, please contact Zach Vanderbosch about adding support for it in phot2lc.

Currently Supported Telescopes

In addition to loading in outputs from photometric pipelines, phot2lc also loads in one or more of the actual images (FITS, ucm, or hcm format), both for display purposes and to grab some key header information such as observer name, filter name, exposure time, observation timestamps, etc. For different telescopes and instruments, the header keywords may have different names or the timestamps may have different formats, so phot2lc needs to be properly configured to read the data.

Data from the following telescopes/instruments are currently supported:

  • McDonald 2.1m with ProEM EMCCD (telcode = mcd2)
  • McDonald 2.7m with Coude Guide Camera (telcode = coud)
  • Perkins 1.8m with PRISM (telcode = perk)
  • Paul and Jane Meyer Observatory 0.6m with ProEM EMCCD (telcode = pjmo)
  • Las Cumbres Observatory 1.0m with Sinistro (telcode = lco1)
  • Kitt Peak 2.1m with KPED (telcode = kped)
  • Palomar 200-in with CHIMERA (telcode = p200)
  • Pico dos Dias Observatory 1.6m with Ixon Camera (telcode = opd)

If your preferred telescope+instrument is not listed here, please contact Zach Vanderbosch about adding support for it in phot2lc. In this case, however, users may find it relatively easy to add support for a new instrument themselves by adding a new entry into the “teledat.py” script that is installed with phot2lc.