SuperWASP Variable Star Photometry Archive (VeSPA)
Metadata for periodic variable stars classified by citizens in the Zooniverse SuperWASP Variable Stars project, with folded light curves and period parameters.
- Size
- 137.5 MB
- Format
- CSV, YAML
- License
- CC-BY-4.0
- Access
- Open Access
- Source
- Zenodo (record 14937227)
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Challenge
SuperWASP volunteers sorted variable stars into families (EW and EA/EB eclipsing binaries, Pulsators, Rotators). Using only the period and photometric numbers in the archive, how cleanly do those families actually separate, and which pair of types is genuinely hard to tell apart from summary statistics alone?
- Where to start
- Load export.csv with usecols to keep just Period Length, Amplitude, Mean magnitude, Classification and Folding flag (the fields.yaml file documents every column). Convert Period Length from seconds to hours (divide by 3600) and filter to Folding flag == 'Certain' for a trustworthy sample. Plot period on a log axis first, then build a period-amplitude diagram coloured by Classification.
- What to share
- A period-amplitude scatter or density plot with the families labelled, plus a short note on which parameters did the separating and which types overlap. For extra credit, train a simple classifier on log-period, Amplitude and Mean magnitude and show a confusion matrix identifying the confusable pair.
💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.