Photometry Using Kepler “Superstamps” of Open Clusters NGC 6791 & NGC 6819

The Kepler space telescope has proven to be a gold mine for the study of variable stars. Usually, Kepler only reads out a handful of pixels around each pre-selected target star, omitting a large number of stars in the Kepler field. Fortunately, for the open clusters NGC 6791 and NGC 6819, Kepler also read out larger “superstamps” which contained complete images of the central region of each cluster. These cluster images can be used to study additional stars in the open clusters that were not originally on Kepler ’s target list. We discuss our work on using two photometric techniques to analyze these superstamps and present sample results from this project to demonstrate the value of this technique for a wide variety of variable stars.