Cutouts from Wide-area TESS Coadded Images ("TESS-COADD-CUTOUTS")

TESS has a simple unobstructed light path, with four cameras each housing seven lenses; fast optics, with a focal ratio of f/1.4; and wide-field detectors, with four cameras each having a 24 x 96 degree field of view. This design is in principle ideal for studies of the low-surface brightness (LSB) environments of Galaxies. A major complication in such studies is, however, the impact of stray light in the images. This project aimed to investigate this issue. The figure on the upper-right of this HLSP's homepage shows a mosaic of co-added Full Frame Images (FFIs) acquired by all four cameras in Sectors 1 to 21, which are those data that had been released as of April 2020. The processing was performed on the Amazon Elastic Cloud 2 with the Montage image mosaic engine (http://montage.ipac.caltech.edu). The most striking feature of the image is the highly variable stray light (even after Montage attempted to correct background radiation to a common level), caused by light from the Earth appearing over the satellite sunshade. Yet on spatial scales of 1 to 2 degrees, the cutouts of the four galaxies in the figure indicate the background is smooth and indicate that even with the extensive stray light, the TESS co-added images can be exploited for LSB studies. The team provides coadded images in FITS format to make cutouts out of, and provide a Jupyter notebook for deriving cutouts of these co-added images for any position or resolvable object name. The Jupyter notebook is provided "as-is": MAST does not take ownership of maintaining the notebook itself.