Welcome to WATSON documentation!
WATSON (Visual Vetting and Analysis of Transits from Space ObservatioNs is a lightweight software package that enables a comfortable visual vetting of a transiting signal candidate from Kepler, K2 and TESS missions.
Any transiting candidate signal found in a space-based mission could have been potentially generated by different sources or even be instrumental artifacts induced into a target’s light curve. To rule-out these scenarios, the Science Processing Operation Center (SPOC) of the NASA implemented the Data Validation (DV) Reports, which are one or two pages sheets showing different metrics to qualify or discard an analyzed candidate. These scenarios are mainly
Transit shape model fit
Odd-even transits checks,
Centroids shifts
Optical ghost effects
Transit source offsets
Rolling band contamination histograms
WATSON is also implementing similar but more simplified checks for all of those scenarios (SPOC fits transits models and we just compute the SNR of the possible candidate signal) except the rolling band contamination. In addition, we included a new check comparing the transit SNRs in the different available cadences and also all the single-transit plots computed with the official pipeline aperture and a smaller one. With all of these data, we compute metrics that might alert the scientist about problematic signals not complying with any of the thresholds.