Kepler Bonus Aperture Light Curves ("KBONUS-APEXBA")

NASA's Kepler mission observed background regions across its field of view for more than three consecutive years using custom-designed super apertures (EXBA masks). Since these apertures were designed to capture a region of the sky rather than single targets, the Kepler Science Data Processing pipeline produced Target Pixel Files (TPFs), but did not produce light curves for the sources within these background regions. For this data set, the team produced light curves for 9,327 sources observed in the EXBA masks. These light curves are generated using aperture photometry estimated from the instrument's Pixel Response Function (PRF) profile computed from Kepler's full-frame images (FFIs). The PRF models enable the creation of apertures that follow the characteristic shapes of the PSF in the image and the computation of flux completeness and contamination metrics.

A full description of this dataset can be found in Martinez-Palomera et al. 2021, as well as the Python library kepler-apertures that was used to extract the light curves for the EXBA sources.

NASA开普勒任务使用自定义设计的超级孔径（EXBA掩膜），对其视场内的背景区域进行了连续三年以上的观测。由于这些孔径旨在捕捉天空中的一片区域而非单个目标，开普勒科学数据处理流水线生成了目标像素文件（Target Pixel Files，TPF），但未为这些背景区域内的源生成光变曲线。本数据集的研究团队为EXBA掩膜中观测到的9327个源生成了光变曲线。这些光变曲线通过孔径测光获得，该测光基于从开普勒全帧图像（Full-Frame Image，FFI）计算得到的仪器像素响应函数（Pixel Response Function，PRF）剖面估算得出。PRF模型能够生成遵循图像中点扩散函数（Point Spread Function，PSF）特征形状的孔径，并可计算流量完整性与污染度量指标。
该数据集的完整描述可见于Martinez-Palomera等人2021年的研究，以及用于提取EXBA源光变曲线的Python库kepler-apertures。