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Mission Overview

Halo Photometry for 98 of the Brightest Stars Observed by TESS (HALO-TESS)

 

Primary Investigator: Jonatan Rudrasingam

HLSP Authors: Benjamin Pope, Tim Bedding

Released: 2026-03-11

Updated: 2026-03-11

Primary Reference(s):  Rudrasingam et al. 2026

DOI: 10.17909/tzm7-r151

Citations: See ADS Statistics

Read Me

 
A Color-Magnitude Diagram showing the stars in the HALO-TESS sample.
A Color-Magnitude Diagram showing the stars in the halo photometry sample in the Hipparcos and Tycho catalogs, colored based on the number of TESS sectors available, and overlaid on the background of the Hipparcos stars. The size of the points corresponds to the V-band magnitude. A few prominent and interesting stars are highlighted in the figure.

Overview

The brightest stars in TESS are saturated, producing long bleed columns, which complicate simple aperture photometry. With the HALO-TESS project, the team has produced light curves for 98 of the brightest stars observed by TESS in Sectors 1-93 (a total of 411 light curves), similar to the previous K2 Bright Star Survey (HALO). The light curves were extracted using the unsaturated pixels in the halo of the PSF and weighted using Total-Variation minimization (halo photometry).

Data Products

There are a total of 411 light curves in this collection. The light curve files have names of the form:

hlsp_halo-tess_tess_ffi_<TICID>-<TESS-Sector>_tess_v1_lc.fits

where:

  • <TICID> is the TESS Input Catalog ID of the star

  • <TESS-Sector> is the sector number for the given light curve.

The data extension (first extension) of the _lc.fits files consists of the following columns:

  • TIME = time at mid-point of cadence, in Barycentric TESS Julian Date

  • FLUX = HALO flux from the aperture

  • FLUX_ERR = uncertainty in the FLUX column (NaNs)

  • CADENCENO = unique integer incremented by one with each cadence

  • MOM_CENTR1 = moment-derived column centroid.

  • MOM_CENTR2 = moment-derived row centroid.

  • QUALITY = quality flag

The second extension contains the fitted weightmap of each light curve for additional quality information.

Data Access

MAST Portal and Astroquery

The HALO-TESS data products are available in the MAST Search Portal (web-based, cross-mission search interface) and Astroquery (Python package to search for and download files from Python scripts you write).

  • In the MAST Search Portal, set the Provenance Name filter to "halo-tess" in an Advanced Search to find these data. The user guide for how to search and download products using the MAST Portal is available here.
  • For Astroquery, the following example code demonstrates how to search for and download these products. This code assumes that you want to download all products from this HLSP, so you may want to consider narrowing down your search for large HLSPs (> 10 GB) or those with many individual files (> 10k). You can find more astroquery.mast tutorials here.
from astroquery.mast import Observations
# Search for all HALO-TESS products
all_obs = Observations.query_criteria(provenance_name="halo-tess")
data_products = Observations.get_product_list(all_obs)
# Print the number of data products that would be downloaded
print(len(data_products))
# Download data
Observations.download_products(data_products)

  • MAST Portal

    Link to the MAST Portal Webpage
    A web-based interface for cross-mission searches of data at MAST or the Virtual Observatory.
    Portal

  • MAST Astroquery

    Search for and download data products for this HLSP programmatically in Python.
    MAST Astroquery

Citations

Please remember to cite the appropriate paper(s) below and the DOI 10.17909/tzm7-r151 if you use these data in a published work. 

Note: These HLSP data products are licensed for use under CC BY 4.0.

References

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