SAPLE: Swift Analysis Pipeline for Lightcurve Extraction

TL;DR

SAPLE is a semi-automated pipeline that extracts lightcurves and spectral data from Swift-UVOT and Swift-XRT observations, providing tools not previously publicly available.

Contribution

The pipeline offers new semi-automated tools for extracting absorption-corrected fluxes and lightcurves, enhancing community access to Swift data analysis.

Findings

Provides absorption-corrected fluxes for any observation and filter.

Enables extraction of flux and photon index lightcurves assuming a redshifted powerlaw.

Main codes are available on GitHub for community use.

Abstract

We present the Swift Analysis Pipeline for Lightcurve Extraction (SAPLE), a semi-automated pipeline to extract the Swift-UVOT and Swift-XRT data products and spectral information (magnitudes, photon indices, and fluxes) for a set of observations of any point source of interest. This pipeline is not meant to substitute, but to complement the tools the Swift team has already set up. Specifically, SAPLE provides a Swift-UVOT semi-automated pipeline that also returns the absorption corrected specific fluxes for any observation and filter of interest, a tool which to our knowledge is not publicly available to the community yet. Moreover, for Swift-XRT, SAPLE enables the user to extract a lightcurve of both flux and photon index (with associated uncertainties), assuming a redshifted powerlaw spectrum. The main codes are available through a GitHub repository (L. Marcotulli & N. Torres-Alb\`a 2026), and the following paper summarizes the main steps of the analysis.