About

Vision

My original idea was to produce something like a wide-format coffee-table book, with the two plots on one side and the descriptions on the other. But I realised that more people would probably be able to access the content online, so I decided to try to simultaneously build both the website and PDF from the same content.

I haven’t yet mastered Sphinx’s LaTeX controls to produce precisely what I’m hoping for. Among other things, I’d ultimately like the references to appear as they normally would in the PDF but as hyperlinks in the web version. I also need to clear certain pages to make sure the figures keep appearing on the same side.

Origin

In 2019, when TESS’s data was relatively new, we would look through the data in search of solar-like oscillations. I paged past however many systems that were hoped to be solar-like oscillators but instead turned out to be other things. But I was immediately struck by the light curves’ quality. If I remember correctly, I eventually stumbled upon a Cepheid variable. It was disappointing that the star had ended up misclassified but the phase-folded light curve was a textbook example.

This inspired me to rework some of our inspection tools into plotting phase-folds and amplitude spectra, though we usually only look at power spectra for solar-like oscillations. I scraped the light curves for every Argelander-designated star with a short-cadence light curve and would lift my spirits by simply paging through the figures.

I increasingly found myself sharing these figures more widely (often on Twitter) and eventually decided to create this atlas, sparked into action mostly by a conversation with Josh Pepper at TASC6/KASC13 in Leuven in July 2022.

Acknowledgements

I should first thank Josh Pepper for pushing me over the edge into creating this. His enthusiasm for the concept was enough for me to think that maybe I wasn’t the only person who would enjoy paging through TESS light curves (though perhaps I am?).

An enormous amount of credit is owed to the team, originally at the Kepler Guest Observer office, who created the lightkurve Python package, without which all of this would be vastly more difficult and probably would never have happened.

Finally, it should be obvious that this would be impossible without TESS itself. I extend my thanks to everyone who made the mission possible, be that the people who proposed it, championed it, rallied funding, built and tested the instrument, maintain the databases, monitor its status and keep it running, propose the mission extensions, and so on.

Contributions

This project is hosted in a public repository. You are welcome to visit it, where you’ll find more information about how it actually works, and can open issues or create merge requests to fix typos or other errors, or add content. If you think a certain star should feature, open an issue or a merge request to add the star to the relevant tables from which the light curves and page structure is created.