Kepler & K2
Good news! The Kepler spacecraft successfully completed its K2 Campaign 17 last week, on May 8th, and the full data set has now been downlinked to Earth.
To enable users to make use of the current visibility of the Campaign 17 field from the ground, the raw C17 data have been made public immediately via the K2 data archive at MAST. The Campaign was focused, in part, on supernova science, and it is thought that approximately 27 candidate supernova events have been captured in the telemetered pixels.
The use of the raw, uncalibrated data files requires an intimate understanding of their format and caveats. For scientific investigations that are not time-critical, we recommend that users wait for the calibrated and quality-controlled data products to become available in approximately 3 months.
Meanwhile, K2 Campaign 18 successfully started on Sunday morning, May 13th, near midnight UTC. Uniquely, Campaign 18 is the third visit to the K2 legacy field which includes both the M44 (Beehive) and M67 open star clusters. Campaign 18 overlaps entirely with C5, and partially with C16, providing a dataset with a 3-year baseline and 8-month duty cycle towards a Galactic sightline that is located 130 degrees away from the original Kepler field in Cygnus.
