Installation¶

Install the package using pip:

pip install eclipsebin

Prepare your Light Curve¶

• Phase your light curve. Phases must fall between 0 and 1.
• Convert magnitude to flux.
• Normalize the fluxes. The out-of-eclipse normalized flux should be close to 1.

Create an EclipsingBinaryBinner Object¶

Assuming you already have your phases, fluxes, and flux uncertainties stored as phases, fluxes, and fluxerrs, respectively, initialize your EclipsingBinaryBinner:

import eclipsebin as ebin

# Example usage
binner = ebin.EclipsingBinaryBinner(phases, fluxes, fluxerrs, nbins=200, fraction_in_eclipse=0.5, atol_primary=0.001, atol_secondary=0.05)

Here nbins indicates the desired total number of bins, and fraction_in_eclipse indicates the fraction of that total number of bins that you wish to place within the eclipse regions.

You can also optionally set atol_primary and/or atol_secondary, which specify the absolute tolerance of the corresponding eclipse ingress and egress regarding their proximity to one. These arguments are typically only necessary for systems with significant ellipsoidal variations, as the out-of-eclipse regions are more variable. By default, these values are calculated within the code by taking proximity_to_one * 0.05, where proximity_to_one indicates the distance of the corresponding eclipse minimum* from unity.

*Note that this is a rough approximation and may be inaccurate for some light curves. See Binning Scheme for more details.

Now just call one simple function to bin your light curve, and plot it if you wish.

bin_centers, bin_means, bin_stds = binner.bin_light_curve(plot=True)

And voila, you have your binned light curve! Do with it as you wish.