High Precision Photometry for K2 Campaign 1

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new data reduction pipeline for the K2 mission, producing high-precision light curves with improved accuracy and reduced systematics, enabling better stellar and exoplanet studies.

Contribution

We developed a novel reduction pipeline that derives global astrometric solutions and extracts high-precision photometry from K2 data, providing publicly available light curves with enhanced quality.

Findings

Median residual of astrometric solutions is ~0.13"

Best 6.5-hour precision for raw light curves is ~20 ppm

Detrended light curves achieve ~15 ppm precision

Abstract

The two reaction wheel K2 mission promises and has delivered new discoveries in the stellar and exoplanet fields. However, due to the loss of accurate pointing, it also brings new challenges for the data reduction processes. In this paper, we describe a new reduction pipeline for extracting high precision photometry from the K2 dataset, and present public light curves for the K2 Campaign 1 target pixel dataset. Key to our reduction is the derivation of global astrometric solutions from the target stamps, from which accurate centroids are passed on for high precision photometry extraction. We extract target light curves for sources from a combined UCAC4 and EPIC catalogue -- this includes not only primary targets of the K2 campaign 1, but also any other stars that happen to fall on the pixel stamps. We provide the raw light curves, and the products of various detrending processes aimed at removing different types of systematics. Our astrometric solutions achieve a median residual of ~ 0.13". For bright stars, our best 6.5 hour precision for raw light curves is ~20 parts per million (ppm). For our detrended light curves, the best 6.5 hour precisions achieved is ~15 ppm. We show that our detrended light curves have fewer systematic effects (or trends, or red-noise) than light curves produced by other groups from the same observations. Example light curves of transiting planets and a Cepheid variable candidate, are also presented. We make all light curves public, including the raw and de-trended photometry, at http://k2.hatsurveys.org.