Mission Overview
Catalog of Integrated Light Star Cluster Light Curves in TESS (ELK)
Primary Investigator: Tobin Wainer
HLSP Authors: Tobin Wainer
Released: 2025-02-04
Updated: 2025-02-04
Primary Reference(s): Wainer et al. 2023a, Wainer et al. 2023b
DOI: 10.17909/f4kb-vc30
Citations: See ADS Metrics
elk light curves are available as HLSPs. The top row shows the distribution of the Milky Way clusters in Galactocentric radius and height above the plane, and of the SMC and LMC clusters in RA and Dec, colored by their ages. The bottom panels show the distributions of cluster angular radius (left), median TESS magnitude of the integrated light (center), and log(age) of the clusters (right). Background (g-band) images of the LMC and SMC are from the SMASH survey (Nidever et al 2017; Nidever et al. 2021).Overview
The team presents integrated light TESS light curves from the publicly available elk code (Wainer et al. 2023a). The light curves here are integrated over an aperture and contain many blended sources. The first data release are light curves for entire star clusters in the Milky Way and Small and Large Magellanic Clouds. The process for selecting these clusters, and the light curve correction are described in Wainer et al. (2023b). All data products can easily be opened and analyzed with elk.
Data Products
Each fits file contains a header with an overview of each target's contents, with light curves for specific TESS sectors in extensions.
Data file naming convention:
hlsp_elk_tess_ffi_<targ>_tess_<ver>_llc.fits
where:
- <targ> represents the target name, usually in the form of cluster-member
- <ver> represents the version number
Data file types:
| _llc.fits | Light curve file. |