PhoSim v6.3 Completed

Science
#1

The 26th major release of the Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is completed, tagged, and validated as PhoSim v6.3

Some highlights:

  1. PhoSim v6.3 has several new improvements: 1) Several improvements to the implementation of both Rubin and Rubin ComCam as a result of DR1, 2) Implementation or improvements to McDonald, KDrift, Palomar and initial telescope implementation of Gemini, 3) Improvements to tools for new telescope implementation, and 4) various bug fixes, physics, and optimization improvements.

  2. All documentation (tutorials, documentation, links to reference material, etc.) and instructions to get the code are at: https://www.phosim.org

  3. The sixth reference paper has been completed about surface interactions (see technical page).

Please file tickets for bugs at the main site. And please email your feedback, questions, or collaboration ideas!

Best Regards,

John

Details about PhoSim if you are new to it:

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 includes photon/electron physics, hydrodynamic representations of the atmosphere, elasticity simulations of optics, and electrostatics simulation of sensors. 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. 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 6 reference papers. There are dozens of implemented telescopes. In addition, if you don’t want to run PhoSim, there are a substantial amount of example images but PhoSim is relatively easy to install, use, and run yourself.