Studying Variability in Blazars with Multiple Extraction Pipelines developed for the TESS Mission

Blazars are extreme examples of the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) phenomena. The blazar class of radio loud AGN are those oriented such that we are looking nearly down the throat of the relativistic jet, resulting in the observed emission being dominated by processes at work in the jet and being both amplified and time-compressed in our frame. The defining characteristics of blazars are a featureless or nearly featureless optical continuum, large amplitude and highly variable polarization, and large amplitude continuum variability at all wavelengths and on timescales ranging from minutes to decades. In this presentation, I compare blazar light curves produced from several different extraction pipelines to ground truth observations and to each other, with the goal of determining which pipeline most accurately corrects for background and other systematics.