Q2 Data Release and Site Upgrades

We wanted to talk more about the changes to the site and give you all an update on the addition of Quarter 2 data. John’s already talked about the candidates page and some of the new features associated with that, so I wanted to focus on the changes specific to Q2 data release.

NASA and the Kepler team released Quarter 2 on Feb 1st and on Feb 2nd the latest results from the Kepler mission including a complete list of planet candidates and false positives for the first 2 quarters of data. You can read the paper detailing all of this here as well as the Kepler press conference site

The second data release is 90 days so we now have the first approximately 120 days of the Kepler science mission to go through. Q1 was about 35 days, we have chosen to show chunks of the lightcurve in the same size as we were for Q1. So Q2 is broken into three sections. Our aim was to have 5 days worth of overlap in each section, so that we don’t miss any transits that happen at the starts and ends of where we separated the lightcurves. We’re also uploading the Q1 data from the ~400 stars originally withheld and released on Feb 1st. We’ll keep you all posted on the progress.

We have been uploading the new data in batches to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible. Occasionally the Talk links lag behind because we’re trying to upload as fast as you’re all going through the data. And sometimes you beat us to it

so we’ve increased how fast we’re uploading the Q2 data to keep up with your pace. We’ve appreciated all your patience during this process.

You can tell which part of the lightcurve you are looking at by the APH#. The first two numbers are quarter and section so APH22332480 is section 2 of Quarter 2. We use APH for the lightcurve sections and SPH for referring to the star itself. For the SPH numbers the first two numbers refer to what quarter the star first appeared in the public data set. so SPH21332480 first appeared is Quarter 2 Section 1.

The star source pages (like http://www.planethunters.org/sources/SPH10129795) contain all the sections of lightcurve for you to review and the x-axis is the days from the first observation, so you can look for repeat transits in other sections of the lightcurve easily. Also the downloadable CSV file now contains all the available lightcurve data. We have also updated the gap question (the first question asked) in the classify interface, so now you will now be asked the variability questions regardless of how your answer the gap question (before the variability questions were skipped if you answered yes to their being a data glitch or gap in the lightcurve)

We’ve made some changes to Talk to accommodate the Q2 data. The new planet candidates list and false positive list from the Kepler team are now identified. We’re planning in the near future of marking Planet Hunters planet candidates as well. Each lightcurve section has it’s own object page (ie http://talk.planethunters.org/objects/APH22332480). We now have group pages that gather all the available lightcurve object pages for the star (http://talk.planethunters.org/groups/SPH21332480) which you can access through the “View Star” link on any of the object pages. The “Examine Star” link will take you directly to the star’s source page.

As always we welcome feedback on the new changes, and we are listening to your comments and suggestions on Talk and in your emails. We can’t wait to see what we find in the Quarter 2 data.

Happy Hunting,