Kepler/K2 Notebook Tutorial Collection

About this Article

A team of scientists working with the Astropy Project and NumFocus have developed a collection of Jupyter notebook tutorials that show how to retrieve and analyze the time series data collected from the Kepler and K2 missions. These notebooks use the Lightkurve software package to explore the mission data products, demonstrate methods to remove instrumental artifacts, and perform common time series analysis tasks. These tutorials, by combining mission-specific details alongside code that uses the mission data, act to bring the information in the Kepler manuals to life by providing real data examples.  

Kepler and K2 data have been used for a variety of astronomical research including transiting exoplanets, stellar rotation, variable stars, and small bodies of our solar system. Some of these new tutorials walk users through the analysis for specific science cases. They can be used to help anyone get started doing research with the Kepler and K2 data archive. As a sample, some of the available tutorials include:

• Creating Your Own Light Curves using Custom Aperture Photometry

• Removing Instrumental Noise from K2 and TESS Light Curves

• Identifying Transiting Planet Signals in a Kepler Light Curve

• Measuring and Removing a Rotation Period Signal from a Kepler Light Curve

• Estimating a Star's Mass and Radius Using Asteroseismology

All of the tutorials are available in the Space Telescope Science Institute’s notebook GitHub repository. 

The team who contributed to this work included Isabel Colman, Oliver Hall, Geert Barentsen, Nick Saunders, Kelle Cruz, Rebekah Hounsell, Lauren Glattly, Derek Homier, Dan Hey, Scott Fleming, Arfon Smith, Faith Abney, and Susan Mullally.