Planet Hunters Talk

Light curves data are not available for downloading?

  • xavier_gs by xavier_gs

    Hi, I hope this is the right place to ask for this....

    in the first version of planet hunters you had the chance of downloading the lightcurve data for any star into an excel file. I found that feature very useful and built my own repository of data curves mainly for fun, like a personal project.

    I cannot find this feature in this new version of the site. Am I looking at the wrong place? is this feature deprecated? can I access the old interface to download light curves data?

    Thank you for your help Xavier GS

    Posted

  • echo-lily-mai by echo-lily-mai moderator

    Hi this is the right place to ask! I don't know the answer but I will forward this to someone who might know.

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist in response to xavier_gs's comment.

    We haven't built that feature into this version of the discussion tool. Since you could explore the data in Talk, we didn't think much about needed or wanting to plot the data yourself. I can see if the development team are willing to add this feature. One thing that may complicate this, is that for K2 data soon to go on the site, we are using light curves generated by a collaborator. Although the K2 data is public the reduced light curves are not public, so we can show them, but unclear if we can allow people to download them individually yet.

    At least for the Kepler field data, I'll mention it to the development team and see what we can do.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • xavier_gs by xavier_gs

    Hi
    thank you for your answer Meg and for talking to the dev team.
    I had a very good time doing my own analysis and plotting of the curves, so it will be great to have them available on the new site. However, I understand that it will be difficult to have the feature in this new version.

    I read in another thread that the old site is still accessible, can you please confirm that? if the old site and data is up, I can come back there to download the curves and play with them the way I'm used to.

    thank you again for your time
    Xavier GS

    btw. Great new look and interface, congratulations !! hopefully we're having great results and science too

    Posted

  • alschmitt by alschmitt

    Hi Meg,

    Regarding the upcoming K2 light curves, would it be possible for you to ask your collaborator whether the data can be made fully public? I'm sure that many of the senior PH members and the greater science community in general would appreciate access to the data for conducting research using advanced tools and techniques. Currently, the PyKE method for extracting light curves from TPFs is proving to be problematic at best leaving researchers with few options for getting the data they need.

    Any details your collaborator can provide on possible access would be deeply appreciated!

    Cheers,

    Al

    Posted

  • SteveKennett by SteveKennett

    Meg,

    As a scientist myself with my own set of numeric tools, I also would appreciate the data in numerical form. The lack of error information is definitely a minus in the new interface as point scatter is not always a good indication of the extent of the contribution of instrumental noise to a variable signal. The programmer could tone down the "nice work" panel. The red is a little annoying after a while. A spell checker is recommended "Occational" I assume is "Occasional" .

    Otherwise the interface is an improvement!

    Regards,

    Stephen

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist in response to SteveKennett's comment.

    Hi Stephen,

    Thanks for the feedback.

    In terms of the error bars, the Zooniverse development team has done testing and the majority of people don't use them in their assessment of the light curves in the original Planet Hunters so that's why we removed them. The science team fought hard to have error bars in the first version of the site, but when presented with that information from the development team's tests we had to agree with them that error bars could go away in this version of the site. Removing the error bars increases the speed in rendering.

    I have mentioned to the development team the request to bring back the download data button. All the data we show on the site, is in numerical form. It's freely available for download from MAST as binary fits tables or available from the NASA Exoplanet Archive, so there are places where the data can be obtained from if you are interested in exploring it further with any numerical codes or programs you have.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • mschwamb by mschwamb scientist in response to xavier_gs's comment.

    the old site is currently still live at http://old.planethunters.org though that site infrastructure can't handle showing 16 quarters worth of light curves for a star and we're showing a subset of stars here so the old site might not have all of what you need. All the data is freely available for download from NASA MAST or the NASA Exoplanet Archive, as binary fits tables if you know how to extra data from that format.

    Cheers,

    ~Meg

    Posted

  • xavier_gs by xavier_gs in response to mschwamb's comment.

    Thank you for your answer Meg.
    I understand the point of view of Planethunters.org, and also that the data is available elsewhere, so we cannot discuss more on that.

    However, I think that the previous chance of downloading the data in such a simple way from your web site was a First Class feature. It's really a great lost 😦

    In any case thank you for your excellent work !
    XGS

    Posted