Community tools

This webpage lists a selection of tools developed by members of the CHEOPS Science Team, CHEOPS Consortium, and the community. These tools are not maintained by ESA and shared for use at your own risk, with caveats and warnings detailed in the respective documentation.

PYCHEOPS - an open-source software package developed so that users can easily and efficiently analyse transits and eclipses in CHEOPS light-curve data using state-of-the-art techniques. Several examples that demonstrate and test the capabilities of PYCHEOPS are included with the software distribution package in the form of Jupyter Notebooks. We have successfully installed and tested PYCHEOPS on machines running macOS, Windows 10, and Linux operating systems.  The package distribution includes a script make_xml_files that is helpful for the planning and execution of CHEOPS observing requests. PYCHEOPS was developed by Pierre Maxted and the CHEOPS Science Team (see Maxted et al. 2022, ASCL, GitHub, and PyPI). 

PIPE - a photometric extraction package for CHEOPS that is complementing the official Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP). While the DRP is using aperture photometry on the D=200 pixel subarrays provided by CHEOPS, PIPE is using PSF photometry on the D=60 pixel imagettes, often provided with a shorter cadence than the subarrays. The shorter cadence of imagettes increases the time resolution of the photometry. This can be of a distinct advantage for some applications, e.g. when stellar activity such as flares need to be time resolved, or when ingress/egress is desired to be better resolved for timing purposes. Targets with a bright source nearby (e.g. binaries) can have their photometry individually resolved. For faint targets PSF extraction makes better use of the signal by weighting it properly over the PSF, so that higher S/N photometry can be extracted. The shorter cadence and producing an accurate PSF model makes it easier to find and correct for cosmic rays. PSF photometry can properly deal with hot or bad pixels by either giving them a lower weight or masking them entirely in the fitting process. This may become critical as the detector ages in space, making it increasingly harder to find "good" regions on the detector without bad pixels. PIPE was developed by Alexis Brandeker (see GitHub and documentation).

linea - an open source, open development Python package for fast, linear detrending of CHEOPS photometry. linea was developed by Brett Morris (see GitHub and documentation).