Every night, telescopes around the world capture millions of photons from distant stars, creating vast datasets of brightness measurements over time. But buried within this raw photometric data are the subtle signals that reveal some of the universe’s most exciting secrets: exoplanets crossing their host stars, pulsating variable stars, and stellar eruptions. The challenge? Converting these noisy measurements into clean, analyzable light curves that can actually tell us something meaningful about the cosmos.
phot2lc tackles this fundamental challenge with a comprehensive suite of tools designed for real astronomical research. This pure-Python package handles the entire pipeline from raw photometry to publication-ready light curves, featuring intelligent comparison star selection to remove atmospheric effects, customizable aperture optimization, polynomial detrending to eliminate systematic trends, and robust sigma clipping for outlier removal. Perhaps most importantly for precision astronomy, it includes barycentric time corrections—essential for studies requiring exact timing, like exoplanet transit photometry and asteroseismology.
Built on the solid foundation of established tools like WQED but modernized for today’s Python-centric astronomy workflow, phot2lc serves researchers hunting for everything from Earth-sized exoplanets to the subtle pulsations of white dwarf stars. With its interactive interface and one-line installation, it’s democratizing access to professional-grade photometric analysis, whether you’re a seasoned astronomer or a developer diving into the data-rich world of time-domain astronomy.
⭐ Stars: 5
💻 Language: Python
🔗 Repository: zvanderbosch/phot2lc