Flare science in Kepler, K2 and TESS light curves

AltaiPony is a toolbox for statistical flare studies in photometric time series from Kepler, K2, and TESS, including flare search and characterization, injection/recovery diagnostics, and statistical analysis of flare frequency distributions along with extensive documentation and tutorials.

Jump to Getting Started to get an overview!

AltaiPony

• Quickstart
  • Installation
  • Getting Started
  • Next Steps
• Tutorials
  • Finding Data
  • De-trending Light Curves
  • Finding Flares
  • Synthetic Flare Injection and Recovery
  • Flare Frequency Distributions and Power Laws
• API Documentation
  • FlareLightCurve
  • FFD
• Frequently Asked Questions
  • plt.show() does not show any plots once I import AltaiPony. How can I fix this?
  • What is detected as a flare and not a flare?
  • What are the default settings for flare detection?
  • How does AltaiPony handle the ramp ups at the end of TESS orbits?
  • What is defined as a the start and stop time of a flare?
• Changelog (starting 04-2023)
  • 25-08-2023
  • 15-06-2023
  • 03-05-2023
  • 28-04-2023

Problems?

Often, when something does not work in AltaiPony, and this documentation is useless, troubleshooting can be done by diving into the extensive lightkurve docs. Otherwise, you can always shoot Ekaterina an email or directly open an issue on GitHub. Many foreseeable problems will be due to bugs in AltaiPony or bad instructions on this website.

Contribute to AltaiPony

AltaiPony is under active development on Github. If you use AltaiPony in your research and find yourself missing a functionality, I recommend opening an issue on GitHub or shooting Ekaterina an email. Please do either of the two before you open a pull request. This may save you a lot of development time.

How to cite this work

If you end up using this package for your science, please cite Ilin et al. (2021) [a] and Davenport (2016) [b].

Please also cite lightkurve as indicated in their docs [1].

Depending on the methods you use, you may also want to cite

• Maschberger and Kroupa (2009) [2] (MMLE power law fit)

• Wheatland (2004) [3] (MCMC power law fit)

• Aigrain et al. (2016) [4] and their software [5] (K2SC de-trending)

[a]

Ekaterina Ilin, Sarah J. Schmidt, Katja Poppenhäger, James R. A. Davenport, Martti H. Kristiansen, Mark Omohundro (2021). “Flares in Open Clusters with K2. II. Pleiades, Hyades, Praesepe, Ruprecht 147, and M67” Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 645, id.A42, 25 pp. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202039198

[b]

James R. A. Davenport “The Kepler Catalog of Stellar Flares” The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 829, Issue 1, article id. 23, 12 pp. (2016). https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/829/1/23

[1]

https://docs.lightkurve.org/about/citing.html

[2]

Thomas Maschberger, Pavel Kroupa, “Estimators for the exponent and upper limit, and goodness-of-fit tests for (truncated) power-law distributions” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 395, Issue 2, May 2009, Pages 931–942, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.14577.x

[3]

Wheatland, Michael S. “A Bayesian approach to solar flare prediction.” The Astrophysical Journal 609.2 (2004): 1134. https://doi.org/10.1086/421261

[4]

Aigrain, Suzanne; Parviainen, Hannu; Pope, Benjamin “K2SC: flexible systematics correction and detrending of K2 light curves using Gaussian process regression” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 459, Issue 3, p.2408-2419 https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw706

[5]

Aigrain, Suzanne; Parviainen, Hannu; Pope, Benjamin “K2SC: K2 Systematics Correction.” Astrophysics Source Code Library, record ascl:1605.012 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ascl.soft05012A/abstract