Automated Extended Aperture Photometry for K2 RR Lyrae stars

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated Extended Aperture Photometry pipeline for K2 RR Lyrae stars, improving flux collection by optimizing aperture size to account for telescope motion, enabling analysis of thousands of targets.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel automated pipeline for Extended Aperture Photometry tailored to K2 RR Lyrae stars, enhancing data accuracy and processing efficiency.

Findings

Automated pipeline successfully processes nearly 4,000 RR Lyrae targets.

Extended apertures improve flux collection compared to previous methods.

Pipeline comparisons show competitive or superior performance.

Abstract

Light curves for RR Lyrae stars can be difficult to obtain properly in the K2 mission due to the similarities between the timescales of the observed physical phenomena and the instrumental signals appearing in the data. We developed a new photometric method called Extended Aperture Photometry (EAP), a key element of which is to extend the aperture to an optimal size to compensate for the motion of the telescope and to collect all available flux from the star before applying further corrections. We determined the extended apertures for individual stars by hand so far. Now we managed to automate the pipeline that we intend to use for the nearly four thousand RR Lyrae targets observed in the K2 mission. We present the outline of our pipeline and make some comparisons to other photometric solutions.