Preparing Calibrated Pixels for Kepler Photometry

Details Preparing Calibrated Pixels for Kepler Photometry Preparing Calibrated Pixels for Kepler Photometry

May 2007

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...210.8302b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #83.02; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.192

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

The Kepler Mission is designed to characterize the frequency of Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars by observing 100,000 main-sequence stars in a 100 square degree field of view (FOV) and seeking evidence of transiting planets. Kepler's transit detection method uses long photometric time series for each target star, each created by summing several pixels. To support the high-precision photometry required to detect earth-size transits, we have developed new methods for preparing target star pixels for photometry, removing background and cosmic rays. Our background method is based on robust polynomial descriptions of the sky background, and is optimized to minimize the induced time variance injected by the background removal process. Our method of removing cosmic rays takes advantage of the long time series available for each pixel. These time series enable us to identify cosmic rays as discrete outliers in time whose amplitudes are some specified threshold above the statistical noise of the pixel. This approach requires us to identify and remove trends over time in the pixel data, which include stellar variability, effects of pixels going in and out of saturation and large transits in, e.g., eclipsing binary systems. When these trends include regions of large curvature, as is the case in eclipsing binary light curves, polynomial-type trend identification methods break down and induce spurious oscillations. We describe an approach that partitions such problematic light curves into multiple regions, each of which is well-modeled by a polynomial. We further reduce noise by removing trends due to spacecraft motion jitter. The result is residual light curves with variance near the Kepler noise floor, allowing us to easily identify and remove significant cosmic ray events. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods on simulated data.
Funding for this mission provided by NASA's Discovery Program Office, SMD.

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