Example 2: PSF photometry in a K2 cluster¶

In this tutorial we will use PSF-fitting photometry to create a light curve for an object in one of the cluster superstamps observed by K2.

For this purpose, we download one of the target pixel files which K2 obtained towards the Lagoon Nebula (M8) during Campaign 9a:

$wget http://archive.stsci.edu/missions/k2/target_pixel_files/c91/200000000/71000/ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ.fits.gz  We can visualize one of the frames using kepmask: $ kepmask ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ.fits.gz


We would like to create a light curve for the target located near pixel (1013, 918) in the detector.

First, we use keptrim to create a smaller target pixel file by cutting a 3x3 mask around the center of our target:

$keptrim ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ.fits.gz 1013 918 3  This command creates a new target pixel file called ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ-keptrim.fits in the current directory, which contains the desired pixels while preserving all the original metadata. We can then use kepprfphot to fit the Kepler PRF for every frame in our trimmed tpf: $ kepprfphot ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ-keptrim.fits --columns 1013 --rows 918 --fluxes 18000 --prfdir ~/github/pyke_files/kplr2011265_prf/ --background --overwrite --verbose


Note that prf_dir is either a relative or absolute path to a directory containing the PRF files from the Kepler focal plane available in [1].

This command creates a fits file called ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ-keptrim-kepprfphot_0.fits with all the results from the prf photometry including fitted flux and centroids.

We can then write a small python script to see what the light curve looks like

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from astropy.io import fits

f = fits.open('ktwo200071160-c91_lpd-targ-keptrim-kepprfphot_0.fits')
plt.plot(f[1].data['TIME'], f[1].data['PSF_FLUX'], 'ko', markersize=1)
plt.xlabel(r'Time')
plt.ylabel(r'Flux $e^{-} s^{-1}$')
plt.show()


The low frequency components of our light curve can be removed with kepflatten.

 [1] Note that this tool requires the calibration files from the Kepler focal plane characteristics, which can downloaded here: http://archive.stsci.edu/missions/kepler/fpc/prf/