Data from BRITE are supposed to become public, but I'm finding it very hard to get anything. The website for the BRITE consortium contains no links to the data archive - I finally located it via a web search for "BRITE Data Archive." Once there, I found only a fraction of BRITE data listed as publicly available, and even then, none of it was actually viewable or downloadable.
The particular dataset that interests me was collected 2 1/2 years ago, but is still marked as "Proprietary" in the BRITE Wiki. Proprietary periods on public facilities exist so that proposers can get a jump on analysis and publication. The nominal period on BRITE is one year, extendable by six months. But it is looking like BRITE data can be sequestered indefinitely, and I don't understand that.
There also appears to be no way to contact the BRITE program office to learn what is going on.
Tom
Hello Tom,
As a member of BRITE Constellation I can say that we need to be better about making our data more accessible. It is actually something I am currently trying to work on myself. That being said, in general the proprietary period is nominally a year and can be extended. Typically this is 6 months with one notable exception: Thesis protection. If the data are part of a grad students thesis work then they are protected until that work is finished.
The data that are public can be found here:
https://brite.camk.edu.pl/pub/index.html
Under the public light curve archive tab on the left side menu. The wiki tries to be up to date, but we sometimes lag behind so the star may in fact be available. However, what is more of a problem, outside of the data availabilty is the state the data comes in. Currently the BRITE data in the public archive are raw. These data need a substantial amount of processing from their raw light curve form to be in a form which is useful for science. We are currently working on an automated processing pipeline so that such data will be available to the public but it is not yet completed. If you contact me by email (hpablo@aavso.org) and let me know what star you are looking for I can find out whether it is available and if not why. If it is available I can also process the data for you using my own routines and provide you with the data.
Thanks,
Bert