Flexible Variable Star Extractor: new software for detection of variable stars

Abstract

We developed software for detection of variable stars using CCD photometry. It works with "varfind data" that could be exported after processing CCD frames using C-Munipack. Our goals were maximum automation and support of large fields of view with thousands of stars. The program chooses the comparison stars automatically, processes all time series using multiple comparison stars to get final light curves. Different filtering algorithms are used to reduce the impact of outlying points, imaging artifacts and low quality CCD frames without careful manual time series reduction. We implemented various variable detection indices and plotting two-channel diagrams of selected pair of indices and mean brightness of the star to distinguish variables from constant stars for further manual check of outlying points as variable candidates.