Results of the recovery of the amplitude of phase curves versus the number of orbits with which the fit has been made. Each plot represents an example light curve generated with different white noise and amplitude (top panel: noise of 50 ppm per exposure, amplitude of 20 ppm, and period of 2.5 days; bottom panel: noise 300 ppm per exposure, amplitude of 150 ppm, and period of 7.5 days) for an exposure time of 29.4 min. The horizontal black line indicates the amplitude of the entered phase curve and the shaded area in blue is the range in which the phase curve detection criterion is valid. For each combination number of orbits, there are four boxplots that indicate the four different cases considered: WN (blue), WNS (green), WNS-F (red), and WNS-FLC (light blue-green). The red horizontal line on each boxplot indicates the median, the rectangular box is the IQR (see definition in Sect. 2.3) and the thin error bars span the whole distribution of points. In the top figure there is no detection, as the IQR is not fully inside the blue-shaded area, whereas in the bottom figure there is a detection when we accumulate seven or more orbits.