SpaceDisc
Searching NASA TESS survey data for variable stars nobody has catalogued yet, and measuring honestly how good the search is.
- Status
- Shelved, no discovery
- Year
- 2026
- Built with
- Python, NASA TESS data
- Source
- Private
The TESS satellite photographs most of the sky, and the parts near the ecliptic poles get watched for years. SpaceDisc mined that data from the southern continuous viewing zone for periodic variable stars missing from the catalogues, with the goal of a proper submission to the AAVSO variable star index.
The validation field alone was 55,491 light curves over a seven-and-a-half-year baseline. Before trusting any result I tested the detector on known variable stars. It found 22 of 22 in the field it was tuned on but only 43 of 56 outside it, 83 percent overall against the 90 percent I'd set as the bar. A side pilot searching for planets matched only 12 of 60 injected signals.
No discovery is claimed. The honest result is that the search wasn't yet good enough to trust, so I stopped before the full survey rather than publish something weaker.