A MULTIBAND GENERALIZATION of the MULTIHARMONIC ANALYSIS of VARIANCE PERIOD ESTIMATION ALGORITHM and the EFFECT of INTER-BAND OBSERVING CADENCE on PERIOD RECOVERY RATE

We present a new method of extending the single-band multiharmonic analysis of variance period estimation algorithm to multiple bands. We use Sloan Digital Sky Survey Stripe 82 RR Lyrae to show that in the case of a low number of observations per band and non-simultaneous observations, improvements in period recovery rates of up to ≈50% are observed. We also investigate the effect of inter-band observing cadence on period recovery rates. We find that using non-simultaneous observation times between bands is ideal for the multiband method, and using simultaneous multiband data is only marginally better than using single-band data. These results will be particularly useful in planning observing cadences for wide-field astronomical imaging surveys such as Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. They also have the potential to improve the extraction of transient data from surveys with few (≲30) observations per band across several bands, such as the Dark Energy Survey.