LEMON: differential photometry

LEMON is a scientific pipeline, written in Python, that determines the changes in the brightness of astronomical objects over time and compiles their measurements into light curves. The aim of this program is to make it possible to completely reduce thousands of FITS images of time series in a matter of only a few hours, requiring minimal user interaction.

For example, to get the light curve of a transit of HAT-P-16b:

$ lemon astrometry data/*.fits HAT-P-16/
$ lemon mosaic HAT-P-16/*.fits HAT-P-16-mosaic.fits
$ lemon photometry HAT-P-16-mosaic.fits HAT-P-16/*.fits phot.LEMONdB
$ lemon diffphot phot.LEMONdB curves.LEMONdB

The above commands produce, among many others, the following plot:

LEMON aims at taking most of the burden out of the astronomer, working out of the box with any set of images that conform to the FITS standard. In most scenarios, the above four commands are enough to generate the high-precision light curves of all your astronomical objects.