Interactive light curve viewer now live!

MAST has added a new, interactive light curve previewer! When searching for TESS and Kepler timeseries data in the MAST Portal, you will now see an lcviz icon next to compatible search results. Clicking the icon opens the interactive lcviz tool in a new window. This is one of multiple data browsing tools included in the Portal.

Lcviz is feature-rich and supports plotting of your target light curves. By default, a plot of flux vs. time is created. Any metadata included in the associated fits file is displayed in the "metadata" tab. For TESS mission products, you can customize this plot by selecting the flux column (e.g. SAP_FLUX, PDCSAP_FLUX) that you want to use.

Lcviz also supports many common techniques for analyzing light curve data. You can bin points to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and perform a frequency analysis by generating a periodogram. Periodograms can be generated using either the Lomb-Scargle or Box Least Squares methods; stellar astrophysicists and planet hunters alike will find this useful! Users can also remove long-term trends from the data, using a wrapper of the lightkurve "flatten" feature.

Love the tool and want to use it locally? You can! Lcviz is fully compatible with Jupyter Notebooks.