an alternative to the L–S periodogram

Following some experiments and rants over the last few days with Nora Eisner (Flatiron), I wrote down today an algorithm for a hacky replacement of the Lomb–Scargle periodogram. This periodogram method has various bad pathologies, the worst of which is that it presumes that there is exactly one frequency that fully generates the data. If there are two, the assumptions are broken and the good properties are lost.

Not that my alternative has any good properties! It is like the radio interferometry method called CLEAN: It involves iteratively identifying frequencies and fitting them out. It's terrible. But it might be better than some of the wacky hacks that people do right now in the asteroseismology community.