From star trackers to survey missions
Space-based photometry transformed stellar variability studies by providing long, nearly continuous observations from above the atmosphere. WIRE showed that even a star tracker could become a scientifically useful photometer, while Kepler and TESS expanded the scale of precision stellar time-domain astronomy.
TESS and bright stars
TESS is especially valuable for bright nearby stars, but the brightest targets can be saturated and awkward to extract cleanly. A practical research theme is therefore not just finding oscillations, but building reliable workflows for apertures, background treatment, quality flags, contamination, and diagnostics.
Community data products
The TESS asteroseismology community has invested heavily in pipelines and shared data products. This page can link to selected software, notebooks, teaching examples, and project-specific notes on extracting and validating TESS light curves.