AltaiPony

De-trend light curves from Kepler, and TESS missions, and search them for flares. Inject and recover synthetic flares to account for de-trending and noise loss in flare energy and determine energy-dependent recovery probability for every flare candidate. Uses lightkurve under the cover, as well as pandas, numpy, pytest, astropy and more.

Find the documentation at altaipony.readthedocs.io

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

Getting Started

See this notebook for an easy introduction, also docs.

Problems?

Often, when something does not work in AltaiPony, and this documentation is useless, troubleshooting can be done by diving into the extensive lightkurve docs. Otherwise, you can always shoot Ekaterina an email or directly open an issue on GitHub. Many foreseeable problems will be due to bugs in AltaiPony or bad instructions on this website.

Contribute to AltaiPony

AltaiPony is under active development on Github. If you use AltaiPony in your research and find yourself missing a functionality, I recommend opening an issue on GitHub or shooting Ekaterina an email. Please do either of the two before you open a pull request. This may save you a lot of development time.

How to cite this work

If you end up using this package for your science, please cite Ilin et al. (2021) [a] and Davenport (2016) [b].

Please also cite lightkurve as indicated in their docs [1].

Depending on the methods you use, you may also want to cite

• Maschberger and Kroupa (2009) [2] (MMLE power law fit)
• Wheatland (2004) [3] (MCMC power law fit)
• Aigrain et al. (2016) [4] and their software [5] (K2SC de-trending -- DEPRECATED)
• Davenport et al. (2014) [6] or Mendoza et al. (2022) [7] (injection-recovery analysis)

[a]

Ekaterina Ilin, Sarah J. Schmidt, Katja Poppenhäger, James R. A. Davenport, Martti H. Kristiansen, Mark Omohundro (2021). "Flares in Open Clusters with K2. II. Pleiades, Hyades, Praesepe, Ruprecht 147, and M67" Astronomy & Astrophysics, Volume 645, id.A42, 25 pp. https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202039198

[b]	James R. A. Davenport "The Kepler Catalog of Stellar Flares" The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 829, Issue 1, article id. 23, 12 pp. (2016). https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637X/829/1/23

[1]	https://docs.lightkurve.org/about/citing.html

[2]	Thomas Maschberger, Pavel Kroupa, "Estimators for the exponent and upper limit, and goodness-of-fit tests for (truncated) power-law distributions" Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 395, Issue 2, May 2009, Pages 931–942, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2966.2009.14577.x

[3]	Wheatland, Michael S. "A Bayesian approach to solar flare prediction." The Astrophysical Journal 609.2 (2004): 1134. https://doi.org/10.1086/421261

[4]	Aigrain, Suzanne; Parviainen, Hannu; Pope, Benjamin "K2SC: flexible systematics correction and detrending of K2 light curves using Gaussian process regression" Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 459, Issue 3, p.2408-2419 https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stw706

[5]	Aigrain, Suzanne; Parviainen, Hannu; Pope, Benjamin "K2SC: K2 Systematics Correction." Astrophysics Source Code Library, record ascl:1605.012 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ascl.soft05012A/abstract

[6]	Davenport et al., “Kepler Flares. II. The Temporal Morphology of White-light Flares on GJ 1243,” The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 797, p. 122, Dec. 2014, doi: 10.1088/0004-637X/797/2/122.

[7]	Mendoza, J. R. A. Davenport, E. Agol, J. A. G. Jackman, and S. L. Hawley, “Llamaradas Estelares: Modeling the Morphology of White-light Flares,” The Astronomical Journal, Volume 164, Issue 1, id.17, <NUMPAGES>12</NUMPAGES> pp., vol. 164, no. 1, p. 17, Jul. 2022, doi: 10.3847/1538-3881/ac6fe6.