Quickstart

Installation

Use pip to install AltaiPony

pip install altaipony

Or install directly from the repository:

git clone https://github.com/ekaterinailin/AltaiPony.git
cd AltaiPony
python setup.py install

This package depends, on lightkurve, k2sc, numpy, pandas and some other packages, most of which will be installed automatically. Have a look at requirements.txt in the repository to see a more extensive list.

Getting Started

Working with Kepler and TESS light curves is similar, K2 light curves need extra attention, so we treat them separately. For each mission, there is a notebook that will guide you through the basic applications. We recommend taking a look at the Finding Data tutorial.

Kepler Light Curves

If you are working with KeplerLightCurve objects, i.e. light curves from the original Kepler mission, try this notebook. This shows how to fetch a light curve from MAST, de-trend it with a Savitzky-Golay filter from scipy, and find some flares.

TESS Light Curves

If you are working with TessLightCurve objects, i.e. light curves from the TESS mission, you may want to try this other notebook instead. In this one, you can also test the injection recovery feature of AltaiPony, and obtain recovery probability and a corrected equivalent duration (ED, aka luminosity independent flare energy).

K2 Light Curves

If you are working with KeplerLightCurve objects, i.e. light curves from the K2 mission, this last notebook is for you. It will run k2sc’s GP de-trending and find flares in a typical K2 long cadence light curve despite its heavy instrumental artifacts.

Next Steps

Define your own flare finding

Once you have tried basic AltaiPony on your light curves, you can start to adjust the flare finding parameters to your application, as explained in the Finding Flares tutorial.

Test the performance of your flare finding algorithm

You may then want to test the perfomance of your chosen flare finding setup by injecting and recoving synthetic flares into your light curves. AltaiPony provides a framework to do so, explained in the Synthetic Flare Injection and Recovery tutorial. Check out the visualization notebook for nice plots.

Analyze flare frequency distributions

For a statistical analysis of your flares, AltaiPony also features a set of tools for the analysis of flare frequency distributions, including visualization, and different methods for power law fitting. For starters, check out the tutorial on Flare Frequency Distributions and Power Laws. If you want to go hands on, start with the beginner notebook. For more advanced applications, like working with samples of multiple stars and their flares, go to the advanced notebook.