The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) produces Full Frame Images (FFIs) at a half hour cadence and keeps the same pointing for ~27 days at a time. Astrocut performs the same cutout across all FFIs that share a common pointing to create a time series of images on a small portion of the sky.

The Astrocut package has two parts: the CubeFactory and the CutoutFactory. The CubeFactory class creates a large image cube from a list of FFI files, which allows the cutout operation to be performed efficiently. The CutoutFactory class performs the actual cutout and builds a target pixel file (TPF) that is compatible with TESS pipeline TPFs. Because this software operates on TESS mission-produced FFIs, the resulting TPFs are not background-subtracted. In addition to the Astrocut software itself, the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST) provides a cutout service, TESScut, which runs Astrocut on MAST servers, and allows users to simply request cutouts through a web form or direct HTTP API query.