ZTF Light Curve Tutorial

A beginner-friendly tutorial for exploring ZTF period-finding catalogs and plotting light curves.

Quick start

1. Create a conda environment

conda create -n ztf-example python=3.10 -y
conda activate ztf-example

2. Install dependencies

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Launch JupyterLab

jupyter lab

Then open the notebooks in order:

Notebook	Topic
01_exploring_catalogs.ipynb	Load and filter the pre-computed Lomb-Scargle / BLS catalogs
02_plotting_lightcurves.ipynb	Extract and plot ZTF light curves from HDF5 matchfiles
03_period_finding.ipynb	Compute periodograms and validate periods

Data paths

These notebooks expect the following data to be available on the system:

• /ztf/matchfiles/ — HDF5 matchfiles organized by field number
• /ztf/catalogs/lomb_scargle/ — .result files from the Lomb-Scargle period search
• /ztf/catalogs/box_least_squares/ — .result files from the BLS period search

Files

• ztf_tools.py — Python module with high-level functions used by the notebooks
• interesting_objects.csv — Placeholder list of interesting sources (replace with real objects)
• ZTF_Fields.txt — ZTF field definitions (used internally by ztf_tools)
• archive/ — Original scripts (plot_ztf_lc.py, utils.py) preserved for reference