K2P²: Reduced data from campaigns 0–4 of the K2 mission

¹ Stellar Astrophysics Centre, Department of Physics and AstronomyAarhus University, Ny Munkegade 120, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark
e-mail: rasmush@phys.au.dk
² School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
e-mail: lundm@bison.ph.bham.ac.uk

Received: 16 November 2015
Accepted: 17 August 2016

Abstract

Context. After the loss of a second reaction wheel the Kepler mission was redesigned as the K2 mission, pointing towards the ecliptic and delivering data for new fields approximately every 80 days. The steady flow of data obtained with a reduced pointing stability calls for dedicated pipelines for extracting light curves and correcting these for use in, e.g., asteroseismic analysis.

Aims. We provide corrected light curves for the K2 fields observed until now (campaigns 0–4), and provide a comparison with other pipelines for K2 data extraction/correction.

Methods. Raw light curves are extracted from K2 pixel data using the “K2-pixel-photometry” (K2P²) pipeline, and corrected using the KASOC filter.

Results. The use of K2P² allows for the extraction of the order of 90 000 targets in addition to 70 000 targets proposed by the community – for these, other pipelines provide no data. We find that K2P² in general performs as well as, or better than, other pipelines for the tested metrics of photometric quality. In addition to stars, pixel masks are properly defined using K2P² for extended objects such as galaxies for which light curves are also extracted.