My PhD student Ekaterina Ilin investigates stellar flares in various space-based observations, and has developed a flare-finding code names AltaiPony already a while ago. We used this in several of her papers, for example for the flare census in open clusters (Ilin et al. 2019, Ilin et al. 2021) and the high latitude flares on M dwarfs (Ilin et al. 2021, blog post). After having it available on github already for a good while, Ekaterina has now also published her code in the peer-reviewed Journal for Open Source Software and it is linked in the Astrophysical Source Code Library. It is pip-installable and a very useful tool!

AltaiPony: Flare finder for Kepler, K2, and TESS light curves

github – JOSS – ASCL

Ilin, Ekaterina; Schmidt, Sarah J.; Poppenhäger, Katja; Davenport, James R. A.; Kristiansen, Martti H.; Omohundro, Mark

AltaiPony de-trend light curves from Kepler, K2, and TESS missions, and searches them for flares. The code also injects and recovers synthetic flares to account for de-trending and noise loss in flare energy and determines energy-dependent recovery probability for every flare candidate. AltaiPony uses K2SC (ascl:1605.012), AstroPy (ascl:1304.002) and lightkurve (ascl:1812.013) in addition to other common codes, and extensive documentation and tutorials are provided for the software.

Astrophysics Source Code Library, record ascl:2201.009, January 2022