Prediction of transits of solar system objects in Kepler/K2 images: extension of Virtual Observatory service SkyBoT

J. Berthier, B. Carry, F. Vachier, S. Eggl, A. Santerne
(Submitted on 23 Feb 2016)

All the fields of the extended space mission Kepler/K2 are located within the ecliptic. Many solar system objects thus cross the K2 stellar masks on a regular basis. We aim at providing to the entire community a simple tool to search and identify solar system objects serendipitously observed by Kepler. The SkyBoT service hosted at IMCCE provides a Virtual Observatory (VO) compliant cone-search that lists all solar system objects present within a field of view at a given epoch. To generate such a list in a timely manner, ephemerides are pre-computed, updated weekly, and stored in a relational database to ensure a fast access. The SkyBoT Web service can now be used with Kepler. Solar system objects within a small (few arcminutes) field of view are identified and listed in less than 10 sec. Generating object data for the entire K2 field of view (14{\deg}) takes about a minute. This extension of the SkyBot service opens new possibilities with respect to mining K2 data for solar system science, as well as removing solar system objects from stellar photometric time-series.

Subjects: Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP)
Cite as: arXiv:1602.07153 [astro-ph.EP] (or arXiv:1602.07153v1 [astro-ph.EP] for this version)
Submission history
From: Jerome Berthier
[v1] Tue, 23 Feb 2016 13:54:49 GMT (1479kb,D)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.07153