Mission Overview
TESS Quick-Look and Lightcurve Analysis (TEQUILA)
Primary Investigator: Lev Tal-Or
HLSP Authors: B.B. Ogunwale, Y. Zaguri, V. Perdelwitz, M. Volschow, S.Y. Azulay, D. Guetta, L. Tal-Or
Released: 2025-12-11
Updated: 2025-12-11
Primary Reference(s): Ogunwale et al. 2025
DOI: 10.17909/pj9v-7t21
Citations: See ADS Statistics
Source Data:
Example TEQUILA lightcurve of the dwarf nova ASASSN-15nl (TIC 1000887074) extracted from TESS Sector 16. The transient’s superoutburst brought the source into the detectable range, demonstrating TEQUILA’s ability to recover faint variables and transient events that fall below the detection limits of other TESS FFI pipelines.
Overview
The TEQUILA (TESS Quick-Look and Lightcurve Analysis) project provides a comprehensive catalog of variable point sources extracted from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Full-Frame Images (FFIs) spanning Sectors 1–26 of the prime mission. Using a Difference Image Analysis (DIA) pipeline, TEQUILA delivers over six million differential photometry lightcurves that capture a wide range of astrophysical variability — including stellar variables, transient events, and solar system objects. Each lightcurve is provided in FITS format with metadata describing data quality, blending, systematic classification, and SSO contamination flags. The catalog serves as both a discovery resource and a foundation for statistical time-domain studies using TESS data.
Data Products
The light curves have the following file naming convention:
hlsp_tequila_tess_ffi_<sector>-<cam>-<ccd>-<xcoord>-<ycoord>_tess_v1_llc.fits
where:
- <sector> = The Sector represented as a 4-digit, zero-padded string, preceded by an 's', e.g., 's0026' for Sector 26.
- <cam> = The Camera number, one of {1, 2, 3, 4}.
- <ccd> = The CCD number, one of {1, 2, 3, 4}.
- <xcoord> = The X-coordinate of the pixel-extracted light curve, represented as a 4-digit, zero-padded string, preceded by an 'x', e.g. 'x0005' for an x-coordinate of 5.
- <ycoord> = The Y-coordinate of the pixel-extracted light curve, represented as a 4-digit, zero-padded string, preceded by a 'y', e.g. 'y0197' for a y-coordinate of 197., camera, ccd, x- and y-coordinate of the target, all separated by hyphens (e.g., hlsp_tequila_tess_ffi_s0008-cam2-ccd2-x0005-y0197_tess_v1_llc.fits is a lightcurve extracted from Sector 8, Camera 2, CCD 2, at pixel (x, y) = (5, 197)).
The catalogs have the following naming convention:
hlsp_tequila_tess_ffi_<sector>_tess_v1_master-frame-phot-cat.fits
where:
- <sector> = The Sector represented as a 4-digit, zero-padded string, preceded by an 's', e.g., 's0026' for Sector 26.
Data file types:
| _llc.fits | Differential and calibrated flux light curves extracted using difference image analysis (DIA) for variable sources identified in each TESS FFI. |
| _master-frame-phot-cat.csv | Catalog tables listing all detected variable sources per CCD, including coordinates, variability flags, blending group IDs, SSO contamination flags, and CNN-based systematic classifications. |
Data Access
MAST Portal and Astroquery
The TEQUILA 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 "tequila" 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 TEQUILA products in TESS Sector 1
all_obs = Observations.query_criteria(provenance_name="tequila", sequence_number=1)
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)
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A web-based interface for cross-mission searches of data at MAST or the Virtual Observatory.
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Search for and download data products for this HLSP programmatically in Python.
Direct Download
The summary tables for this HLSP are available for direct download using the links in the table below: