The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) produces Full Frame Images (FFIs) at a half hour cadence and keeps the same pointing for ~27 days at a time. Astrocut performs the same cutout across all FFIs that share a common pointing to create a time series of images on a small portion of the sky.

The Astrocut package has two parts: the CubeFactory and the CutoutFactory. The CubeFactory class creates a large image cube from a list of FFI files, which allows the cutout operation to be performed efficiently. The CutoutFactory class performs the actual cutout and builds a target pixel file (TPF) that is compatible with TESS pipeline TPFs. Because this software operates on TESS mission-produced FFIs, the resulting TPFs are not background-subtracted. In addition to the Astrocut software itself, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) provides a cutout service, TESScut, which runs Astrocut on MAST servers, and allows users to simply request cutouts through a web form or direct HTTP API query.

Astronify contains tools for sonifying astronomical data, specifically data series. Data series sonification takes a data table and maps one column to time, and one column to pitch. This technique is commonly used to sonify light curves, where observation time is scaled to listening time and flux is mapped to pitch. While Astronify’s sonification uses the columns “time” and “flux” by default, any two columns can be supplied and a sonification created.