Working with Photometry Data

Photometry data attributes

PhotometryData objects always have these attributes, also available dictionary-style:

• coord – an astropy SkyCoord object with the coordinates for each star

• mag_inst – the instrumental magnitude for each star

• mag_inst_error – error in the instrumental magnitude for each star

• passband – the filter of the photometry

• bjd – Barycentric Julian Date of the midpoint of the observation

These objects are also astropy tables, and there is much more information available in the table beyond these attributes.

Generating a light curve from photometry data

One of the more common tasks when performing photometry is generating a light curve for one or more of the objects in the field, i.e. magnitude or flux vs time for that object. The lightcurve_for method lets you generate a lightkurve.LightCurve object for any of the stars in your field. You can specify the name of the star, the coordinates of the star or the star_id assigned by stellarphot. See the lightkurve documentation for examples of how to plot a light curve, perform a periodogram on it, fold it, and more.