MICADO + ScopeSim

Introduction

A new MICADO data simulator is being developed as part of the generic simulator ScopeSim, a descendant of the older SimCADO software.

Prerequisites

  • A working installation of Python 3.6 or newer

  • A working installation of Jupyter notebooks if you want to run the simulator from notebooks, i.e. using a graphical interactive interface, rather than just the terminal or scripts (highly recommended)

  • A working installation of the Python package installer pip

Note

Bug reports and help-desk

If you come across a bug or get stuck with a certain aspect of ScopeSim or the MICADO package, please get in touch with us (emails addresses below).

Your feedback is the only way we know what needs to be changed/improved with the package and the simulator

Installation & setup

  1. Install scopesim in your python environment:

    $ pip install scopesim

  2. Create a directory where your simulation notebooks will live, e.g. ~/path/to/playing_with_scopesim/

  3. Install relevant irdb packages & download example notebooks into this directory:

    $ python
>> import scopesim
>> scopesim.download_packages(["Armazones", "ELT", "MICADO"])

  4. Download one of the tutorial notebooks (see Python notebooks)

  5. In a Terminal, cd to ~/ScopeSim and execute the notebook by calling:

    $ cd ~/path/to/playing_with_scopesim/
$ jupyter notebook filename.ipynb

  6. Follow instruction and explanations in the notebook.

Python notebooks

Note

To download a notebook from Github, either:

  • view the raw file and save this disk from the browser, or

  • navigate up one level, then right click the file and save as

Download the example notebooks from the Github repo

List of notebooks for MICADO

Scientific use-case notebooks

Science case notebooks

Name

Description

<add title>

<add description>

Validation

The following table shows an overview of the test results for limiting magnitudes assuming a minimal signal-to-noise ration of 5. Green (passed) means a result within the given tolerances, yellow (xfailed) means an expected deviation, red (failed) means an unexpected issue.

Click on each row for a plot of the test results.

Showing results from 6 tests for MICADO

AO mode IMG mode Filter Expected
[mag]		 Obtained
[mag]		 Difference
[mag]		 Status
MCAO IMG_4mas J 27.9 ± 1.0 26.15 -1.746 xfailed
SCAO IMG_4mas J 27.9 ± 1.0 28.67 0.772 passed
MCAO IMG_4mas H 27.5 ± 0.6 26.96 -0.539 passed
SCAO IMG_4mas H 27.5 ± 0.6 28.39 0.885 xfailed
MCAO IMG_4mas Ks 27.1 ± 0.3 27.25 0.147 passed
SCAO IMG_4mas Ks 27.1 ± 0.3 28.16 1.063 xfailed

Difference is calculated as obtained - expected, meaning a positive difference indicates ScopeSim reached a fainter limiting magnitude than the reference document, while a negative difference means ScopeSim did not reach the reference magnitude in that combination of modes and filter.

The code used to generate these results can be found in this GitHub folder.

Documentation and useful references

Contact points