VizieR Online Data Catalog: SuperWASP variable stars (Thiemann+, 2021)

SuperWASP (Pollacco et al. 2006Ap&SS.304..253P) surveyed almost the entire night sky using two identical observatories in La Palma, Canary Islands, and Sutherland, South Africa. Each robotic observatory consisted of eight cameras each with a 14cm aperture and a 7.8x7.8deg² field of view, allowing for a total sky coverage of ~500deg² per exposure. The survey excludes the Galactic plane where the large pixel scale of 16.7arcsec/pixel prevents separation of signals from individual stars in this dense stellar region. SuperWASP observations were reduced using the pipeline described in Pollacco et al. (2006Ap&SS.304..253P). Over the course of ~2800 nights between 2004 and 2013, SuperWASP accumulated ~16 million images containing ~580 billion data points corresponding to ~31 million unique stars (Norton 2018RNAAS...2..216N). The SuperWASP data set therefore provides a high cadence and long baseline of observations for more than 30 million stars with magnitudes between V=8-15.

SVS launched on 2018 September 5, with the aim of classifying the output of the SuperWASP Periodicity Catalogue (Norton 2018RNAAS...2..216N). The aim of SVS is threefold: to identify rare variable stars, to identify populations of variable stars in order to probe the extremes and trends of each population, and to facilitate the future development of a web portal in order to give researchers and the public access to the output of this project.

We constructed the SVS project using the Zooniverse project builder platform (www.zooniverse.org/lab), creating a classification task, tutorial, and 'Field Guide' that provides example light curves and guidance for classification.

(1 data file).