Comparing Optimized Systematic Error Correction Methods on Selected TESS Light Curves

Abstract

The correction of systematic errors in TESS light curves is crucial for all astrophysical analyses employing these observations. Here we present a data analysis and a software package, SysCoCoPy, to investigate and directly compare the performance of the Presearch Data Conditioning (PDC) correcting method from the Science Processing Operations Center (SPOC) pipeline and three correctors developed by the community. We incorporate these three correctors based on their implementations in Lightkurve and are particularly interested in the ability of the four correctors to remove scattered light contamination from the Earth and the Moon, which is a key systematic for TESS. We implemented these correctors in SysCoCoPy with a framework that allows an automatic optimization of their parameters to scale the analysis towards increasingly larger samples. SysCoCoPy provides qualitative and quantitative products for the comparison of individual cases as well as statistical results for selected samples. We currently find that while our automatic parameter optimization provides a significant number of successful scattered-light corrections for two of the correctors with a design that favors this purpose, an statistical analysis of our largest sample indicates that PDC is presently more robust, with a larger overall success level of the metrics used.