WISRD Research & Engineering Journal

2.4 Analyzing Data and Creating Light Curve Graph Once the stars are selected click the analyze button circled in red in Figure 14. The analyze button will run through all “.fits” images that are loaded into the software. This is why loading all the “.fits” images is important. If some are missing the occultation could be shortened or missed entirely. Depending on the number of frames the analysis could take a while but under 200 shouldn’t take longer than 1-2 minutes.

Figure 15. The plot tool is circled in red. Once the software has finished analyzing the frames click on the plot button circled in red in Figure 15. This will pop up multiple windows with graphs showing the star’s light. These are the light curve graphs. A good way to quickly tell if an occultation occurred is to look at the composite data which shows the target star’s brightness as well as the reference stars. If a potential occultation occurred, then the target star brightness will drop substantially, and the reference stars won’t see any change (See Figure 17 for an example). This is not a foolproof method which is why the data must then be put into Pyote. Pyote uses “.csv” files which can be created with PyMovie. Click the “write csv” button which is circled in red in Figure 16. to write a csv or histogram file. Save the file in the same folder as all the “.fits” files.

23