Make TargetPixelFile.interact() more reponsive

Problem description

As stated in the doc, TargetPixelFile.interact() could be quite slow / sluggish.

One possibility to make it effectively faster / more responsive is to let user specify a time / cadence range to plot, rather than plotting for the entire file.

Proposal 1: Add an optional cadence_mask argument to interact(), e.g.,

  # handle only 5 days of plot, rather than the entire 20+ days of data
  tpf.interact(cadence_mask=(tpf.time >= 2010) & (tpf.time < 2015))

Proposal 2 Provide a general filter on TargetPixelFile, e.g. add a select(cadence_mask) method to TargetPixelFile

   # a new TPF object with only 5 days of data
   tpf_subset = tpf.select((tpf.time >= 2010) & (tpf.time < 2015))
   tpf_subset.interact()

Environment

• lightkurve version: v1.11

[barentsen]

I believe we already support this using the following syntax:

tpf[(tpf.time.value >= 2010) & (tpf.time.value < 2015)].interact()

This also works for a LightCurve object, e.g. you can do lc[lc.time.value > 2000].plot().

However the docstring of interact() could certainly be improved by advertising this syntax as a way to speed up the tool!

[barentsen]

Yep. We’ll want to do this using a combination of having more tutorials and having more “Examples” sections in docstrings.

I will go ahead and close this issue, but any and all new issues or PRs related to improving these matters are very welcome!