An HR diagram from the Hipparcos-Tycho catalog. The stars in the HALO-TESS sample are color-coded by the number of available TESS sectors, with their sizes indicating their apparent V-band magnitudes. The y-axis plots absolute V magnitude ranging from 6 to -9, the x-axis plots B-V color ranging from -0.5 to 2.0. A majority of the HALO-TESS targets land from absolute V magnitudes of 2.5 to -6 and B-V colors from -0.5 to 0.25, although a few targets populate unique areas of parameter space.

New HLSP: HALO-TESS provides custom light curves for 98 saturated stars in TESS Full Frame Images. The team presents 411 light curves from Sectors 1-93, of which 77 are identified as variables! archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/halo-tess

There are many more stars in our sample. All light curves will soon be available on MAST, and we encourage anyone interested to have a look at them (9/9)

ε Car is a binary star consisting of a red giant star and a smaller blue star. From the light curve, two signals are visible, each coming from both stars. The longer period signal originates from the red giant, while the shorter period signal originates from the blue companion (8/9)

α Cep was suspected to show oscillations since 1971! However, until now, no one has been able to detect variation in the star. The Fourier spectrum shows many peaks, characteristic of a Delta Scuti variable, confirming the earlier prediction (7/9)

Here is the Fourier spectrum of Pollux. Pollux shows intrinsic variability similar to that of the Sun. From the oscillations, we can derive the star's mass and radius! (6/9)

I will now go through a small subset of stars from my total sample. Here is a light curve of the newly discovered eclipsing binary γ And! γ And is a multi-star system consisting of 5 stars. Two of these stars are oriented in just the right way to be eclipsing (5/9)

Among the sample are the brightest variable stars, including eclipsing binaries and intrinsic oscillating stars. Many oscillate in specific waves due to starquakes, and like earthquakes on Earth, starquakes can be used to tell us about their interiors. (4/9)

Halo photometry works by ignoring oversaturated pixels and weighting unsaturated pixels to extract optimal light curves for each star. The weighting works by minimizing the flux between each consecutive epoch (3/9)

However, with careful statistical weighting and the unsaturated "halo" pixels, we can overcome this problem and obtain high-quality data for these stars. In this paper, I used "halo photometry" to extract high-quality data for 98 of the brightest stars in the night sky observed by TESS (2/9)

Halo Photometry and Asteroseismology for 98 of the Brightest Stars Observed by TESS The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission has facilitated studies of asteroseismology, eclipsing binaries, and transits in many stars. However, the brightest stars saturate TESS, yet th...

My first scientific paper is now public on arXiv!
TESS struggles with the brightest stars due to saturation from overexposure. This is unfortunate, because these are the stars that are amenable to photon-hungry follow-up methods, such as spectroscopy or interferometry (1/9)
arxiv.org/abs/2602.22472