The 25th major release of the Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is completed, tagged, and validated as PhoSim v6.2
See the end of this message if you are new to PhoSim.
Some highlights:
- PhoSim v6.2 has several new improvements:
-Although many new telescopes have been added, there are still many more to go. In the meantime, we created 160 generic telescopes with various aperture sizes, focal lengths, and cameras. This is a simple imperfect design, but is useful when you want a quick simulation of some particular telescope. The explanation of how to do this is on the implemented observatories page.
-We also added a set of standard coatings including filters and a set of standard anti-reflective coatings, so you don’t have to specify the detail for everything. These are useful when adding a new telescope.
-Similarly, we added a set of standard sensors for the same purpose.
-The Palomar Hale telescope has been added.
-The bright star optimization has been redone for more accurate simulation.
-There are a number of misc improvements and updates related to many telescopes.
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All documentation (tutorials, documentation, links to reference material, etc.) and instructions to get the code are at: https://www.phosim.org
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We are continuing to create more tools/APIs related to machine learning/AI.
Please file tickets for bugs at the main site. And please email your feedback, questions, or collaboration ideas!
Regards,
John
PhoSim is an ab initio Monte Carlo simulation code of the IR/optical/UV/X-ray physics of astronomical observations. PhoSim fundamentally creates emergent measurement errors (photometric/astrometric/PSF size/shape) imprinted in realistic images by using basic physics rather than using models/parameterizations. PhoSim is also extremely fast with novel numerical algorithms, advanced Monte Carlo techniques, and efficient multithreading methods. It can be run on laptops/desktops as well as in high performance computing environments. Major improvements in the past 5 years have been: 1) full implementation of opto-mechanical physics, 2) complete sensor electrostatics physics, 3) self-consistent atmosphere global hydro-based representations, 4) a variety of optical surface interface physics 5) generalizations and implementations for many different telescopes, 6) simplification of the user interface, 7) an internal astronomical catalog generator & operations capabilities. There is a major release (vX.Y) twice a year. The major releases include hundreds of revisions. Between releases, there are intermediate patches (vX.Y.Z). These fix urgent bugs. There are hundreds of pages of documentation that are routinely updated, 22 user tutorials, and the 5 reference papers. There are now dozens of implemented telescopes, and more in development from at several different teams. In addition, if you don’t want to run PhoSim yourself, there is a substantial amount of example images which includes the PhoSim Rubin Survey (PRS). PhoSim is relatively easy to install, use, and run yourself.