Quick Tutorial for using GaiaCurves package to fetch Light curves

Maintained by: Chetan Chawla, Sonith L.S., Aniket Kukreti

Motivation

The package is supposed to give the light curves of variable stars from Gaia Data Releases (1 and 2) with a star name that can be resolved by SIMBAD. It eliminates the need of checking different folders/without going through the task of using separate CSV files and cross-matching tables or Datalink from Gaia, and can work on several stars at once (passed through a list)

Document Created by: Chetan Chawla

Last Updated by: Chetan Chawla

Last Updated on: June 25, 2021

#Import module
from GaiaCurves import gaia_lightcurve as gc

#Function to fetch a Gaia ID
gaia_id=gc.gaia_id('NQ Dra')
print('Gaia ID for NQ Dra: ', gaia_id)

Gaia ID for NQ Dra:  2154100169676165120

#Function to fetch the light curve from DR2 as csv (returns the path)
#Use gc.fetch_lightcurve_dr1() to fetch from DR1
path=gc.fetch_lightcurve_dr2(gaia_id)
print(path)

../data/2154100169676165120_data_dr2.csv

#Function to fetch a list of variable stars' lightcurves from Gaia
table=gc.fetch_curves(['NQ Dra','OGLE LMC570.29.005418' ,'gibberish'])
print("Table", table)

Gaia ID not found for given object
Table {'NQ Dra': {'ID': '2154100169676165120', 'pathname': '../data/2154100169676165120_data_dr2.csv', 'source': 'DR2'}, 'OGLE LMC570.29.005418': {'ID': '5284240582308398080', 'pathname': '../data/5284240582308398080_data_dr2.csv', 'source': 'DR2'}, 'gibberish': {'ID': 'N/A', 'pathname': 'N/A', 'source': 'N/A'}}

#Dunction to plot the fetched lightcurve
gc.plot_lightcurve(table['NQ Dra']['pathname'],'NQ Dra',table['NQ Dra']['ID'])