Conspicuous Gas, Cryptic Dust

The movies below show TESS light curves for the complex periodic variables in Bouma et al. (2026), Conspicuous Gas, Cryptic Dust: Spectroscopy and Chromaticities of Complex Periodic Variables.

The movies span 2018-2025 (sectors 1 through 96); their coverage is dictated by the TESS scanning law. The light curves are folded to the periods and reference times noted in each movie’s title. The TESS full-frame image cadence improved over the mission, which is why the sampling for TIC 300651846 and TIC 262400835 improves in 2020 and 2022.

Production notes:

Light curve sources: TIC 300651846: TARS (Boyle et al. 2026). LP 12-502 and DG CVn: SPOC (Jenkins et al. 2016). TIC 262400835: QLP (Huang et al. 2020).

Cleaning: For DG CVn, I subtracted a 2.6 hour sinusoid at the secondary period from the raw light curve. For TIC 262400835, I subtracted a 12.7 hour sinusoid, and a 4.31 day sinusoid, for the secondary and tertiary signals in the TESS light curve.