CASTOR Exposure Time Calculator (ETC)

Overview

This Python package is an open-source, pixel-based exposure time calculator for CASTOR, a proposed Canadian space telescope mission 🇨🇦.

Due to the typically long development cycles of space telescope projects, this tool was developed with a large variety of tunable parameters. castor_etc allows users to define your own telescope, sources, amongst other parameters that are not normally exposed in most other exposure time calculators!

To get started, you can visit our Read the Docs and view the example notebooks. Please also note the acknowledgements prior to using castor_etc in your work.

Installation

To get started quickly, run the following command:

pip install git+https://github.com/CASTOR-telescope/ETC.git

More details on other ways of installation are found in our installation guide.

Examples

To get started, check out the basic example on using castor_etc for photometry.

More examples are available in a separate repository

There is also a work-in-progress, browser-based graphical user interface (GUI) that complements this ETC. This is located in the ETC_frontend repository.

Roadmap

Here are some future plans for the ETC:

• Arbitrary source profiles (i.e., surface brightness profiles) based on a FITS file with spectrum? Not sure what I would be asking the user for in this case (e.g., what unit should the FITS file data be in?)... Please let me know if you have any ideas!
• Support simulating multiple sources within the same aperture (e.g., a point source on top of a galaxy).
• Make unit tests and implement continuous integration.

Questions, Issues, Suggestions, and Other Feedback

For any questions, please feel free to open a discussion on GitHub, or contact one of the maintainers (Isaac Cheng, Tyrone Woods, Jade Yeung, or Charles Lee).

To contribute, please briefly read through our contribution guide

Acknowledgements

Full bibtex entries for each of these are found here

If you are making reference to the CASTOR Telescope, please cite the CASTOR summary paper in SPIE JATIS.

If you use this code in your research, please cite the FORECASTOR I. paper.

Additionally, if you utilize the UVMOS spectrograph features, please cite the UVMOS SPIE proceeding: