While Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) covers a considerable area of the sky during routine observations and the pointing schedule is easy to follow, it is not obvious to retrieve the current and/or predicted visibility of a bulk amount of objects, considering both stationary and moving Solar System targets like asteroids or comets. The program `tessvisibility` is a small piece of highly portable code implemented in both C an UNIX shell, providing functionalities for such bulk retrievals at the accuracy of a TESS pixel. This accuracy includes the gaps between the focal plane CCDs, the gaps between the cameras as well as at the sector-level treatment to obtain visibility information.
@article{arxiv.2012.01173,
title = {TESSVisibility -- When was my favorite star or asteroid observed by TESS?},
author = {András Pál},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.01173},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Submitted to RNAAS. The `tessvisibility` utility is available from https://archive.konkoly.hu/pub/util/tess/tessvisibility/