Welcome to the OGLE Atlas of Variable Star Light Curves. We present here typical and not-so-typical light curves of variable stars of various types observed in the course of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). The aim of this page is to help professional and amateur astronomers identify and classify variable stars detected in their own observations.
The OGLE project is a large-scale sky survey conducted since 1992 by astronomers associated with the University of Warsaw Astronomical Observatory. The PI of the project is Prof. Andrzej Udalski. Observations are carried out with the 1.3-m Warsaw Telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. Currently, the OGLE survey regularly monitors the brightness of about one billion stars in the Galactic bulge and disk, the Magellanic Clouds, and other important regions of the sky. The primary scientific goal of the project is the search for exoplanetary gravitational microlensing events, but the huge amount of high quality photometric data collected by the survey are ideal also for many other astrophysical purposes. During its long history the OGLE project has contributed significantly to many different fields of observational astrophysics: gravitational lensing and microlensing, extrasolar planets, cosmic distance scale, the structure of the Galaxy and Magellanic Clouds, stellar clusters, interstellar extinction, Kuiper Belt objects, etc. One of the most important results of the OGLE project is huge collections of variable stars. The OGLE Collection of Variable Stars consists of over 1,000,000 objects and is now the largest set of variable stars in the world.
The light curves shown on this page were carefully selected from the OGLE Catalog of Variable Stars. We present typical light curves of different types of variable stars, but we also show very rarely seen behaviors, sometimes detected for the first time in the OGLE data. All the light curves were obtained with the standard I photometric band (the Cousins system). They usually consist of several hundred to several thousand observing points obtained between 1997 and 2020, within the second (OGLE-II), third (OGLE-III), and fourth (OGLE-IV) phases of the OGLE project.
If you would like to use our light curves in your scientific work or in a presentation, please click here.
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