A statistical analysis of BRITE data

M. Kondrak, K. Zwintz and R. Kuschnig

Reducing raw data received by satellites or telescopes is an important and challenging step in order to deduce scientific results. Measurements do not only depend on properties of the scientific target, but also on intrinsic instrumental parameters. To remove the undesired instrumental influence on the measured signal, one needs to determine the correlation between both. This is a non-trivial process, since instrumental parameters may correlate with each other and can be time-dependent.
Removing outliers may look simple, but an overcorrection can decrease the quality of the result and might eliminate significant scientific signals. If using a time-series analysis, which is a proper method to obtain information about periodic stellar variability, it is important not to cut off data which may contribute to a periodic pattern, although they might look like outliers.
Within this work a software tool has been developed to assist the user with the reduction of BRIght Target Explorer (BRITE) Constellation data. A uniform reduction tool speeds up and simplifies the data analysis and allows to prioritize the scientific data analysis over the data handling.

Proceedings of the Polish Astronomical Society, vol. 5, 26-31 (2017)

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