Prediction of transits of solar system objects in Kepler/K2 images: An extension of the Virtual Observatory service SkyBoT

TL;DR

This paper extends the SkyBoT Virtual Observatory service to include Kepler/K2 data, enabling rapid identification of solar system objects in the images for scientific analysis and data cleaning.

Contribution

The authors integrated Kepler/K2 observations into the SkyBoT service, allowing fast, VO-compliant searches for solar system objects within the K2 field of view.

Findings

Solar system objects within a small field are identified in less than 10 seconds.

Generating data for the entire K2 field takes about a minute.

The extension facilitates solar system science and data cleaning in K2 observations.

Abstract

All the fields of the extended space mission Kepler/K2 are located within the ecliptic. Many solar system objects thus cross the K2 stellar masks on a regular basis. We aim at providing to the entire community a simple tool to search and identify solar system objects serendipitously observed by Kepler. The SkyBoT service hosted at IMCCE provides a Virtual Observatory (VO) compliant cone-search that lists all solar system objects present within a field of view at a given epoch. To generate such a list in a timely manner, ephemerides are pre-computed, updated weekly, and stored in a relational database to ensure a fast access. The SkyBoT Web service can now be used with Kepler. Solar system objects within a small (few arcminutes) field of view are identified and listed in less than 10 sec. Generating object data for the entire K2 field of view (14{\deg}) takes about a minute. This extension of the SkyBot service opens new possibilities with respect to mining K2 data for solar system science, as well as removing solar system objects from stellar photometric time-series.