Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series

The Lomb–Scargle periodogram is a well-known algorithm for detecting and characterizing periodic signals in unevenly sampled data. This paper presents a conceptual introduction to the Lomb–Scargle periodogram and important practical considerations for its use. Rather than a rigorous mathematical treatment, the goal of this paper is to build intuition about what assumptions are implicit in the use of the Lomb–Scargle periodogram and related estimators of periodicity, so as to motivate important practical considerations required in its proper application and interpretation.