The Kepler Smear Campaign: Light Curves for 102 Very Bright Stars

We present the first data release of the Kepler Smear Campaign, using collateral “smear” data obtained in the Kepler four-year mission to reconstruct light curves of 102 stars too bright to have been otherwise targeted. We describe the pipeline developed to extract and calibrate these light curves and show that we attain photometric precision comparable to stars analyzed by the standard pipeline in the nominal Kepler mission. In this paper, aside from publishing the light curves of these stars, we focus on 66 red giants for which we detect solar-like oscillations, characterizing 33 of these in detail with spectroscopic chemical abundances and asteroseismic masses as benchmark stars. We also classify the whole sample, finding nearly all to be variable, with classical pulsations and binary effects. All source code, light curves, Tillinghast Reflector Échelle Spectrograph spectra, and asteroseismic and stellar parameters are publicly available as a Kepler legacy sample.