KBONUS-APEXBA

NASA's Kepler mission observed background regions across its field of view for more than three consecutive years using custom-designed super apertures (EXBA masks). Since these apertures were designed to capture a region of the sky rather than single targets, the Kepler Science Data Processing pipeline produced Target Pixel Files (TPFs), but did not produce light curves for the sources within these background regions. For this data set, the team produced light curves for 9,327 sources observed in the EXBA masks. These light curves are generated using aperture photometry estimated from the instrument's Pixel Response Function (PRF) profile computed from Kepler's full-frame images (FFIs). The PRF models enable the creation of apertures that follow the characteristic shapes of the PSF in the image and the computation of flux completeness and contamination metrics.

A full description of this dataset can be found in Martinez-Palomera et al. 2021, as well as the Python library kepler-apertures that was used to extract the light curves for the EXBA sources.