spacetelescope/STScI-STIPS

Name: STScI-STIPS

Owner: Space Telescope Science Institute

Description: STScI-STIPS

Created: 2017-06-14 16:18:15.0

Updated: 2018-05-03 15:23:11.0

Pushed: 2018-05-03 15:23:05.0

Homepage: null

Size: 181523

Language: Python

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README

STScI-STIPS

Table of Contents
Overview

STIPS is the Space Telescope Imaging Product Simulator. It is designed to create simulations of full-detector post-pipeline astronomical scenes for any telescope. Currently STIPS has modules for WFC3 IR (F110W and F160W only), JWST (NIRCam Short, NIRCam Long, and MIRI), and WFIRST (WFI). STIPS has the ability to add instrumental distortion (if available) as well as calibration residuals (currently flatfield residuals, dark current residuals, and cosmic ray residuals). It automatically includes Poisson noise and readout noise. It does not include instrument saturation effects. In addition, STIPS has the ability to generate its own scenes, consisting of stellar populations and background galaxies (implemented as Sersic profiles).

Why use STIPS?

STIPS is intended for cases where an ETC (e.g. Pandeia) does not provide enough detector area (e.g. testing photometry code, quick looks at dither patterns or multi-detector observations of a scene). For JWST and WFIRST, it obtains its background count levels and instrumental throughput levels from Pandeia internally, so it should produce output within 10% of output produced by Pandeia.

If extremely good instrumental accuracy is needed, STIPS is not the ideal choice. Instead, the various instrument design teams have produced much more detailed simulators. STIPS is intended to run reasonably quickly, and to make scene generation and observation as easy as possible.

STIPS Python Requirements

STIPS currently runs under python 2.7 (and has been developed with versions 2.7.3 through 2.7.12). Eventually, STIPS will be made compatible with python 3.

STIPS requires the following STScI-supported python packages be installed and running correctly (along with any data files that the packages themselves require, as can be found in their documentation):

STIPS also uses the following (more general) python packages:

Finally, STIPS requires a set of data files whose location is marked by setting the environment variable stips_data. Currently these files are available as part of the STSCI-STIPS-UI github project, but they should eventually be made available as a (versioned) direct download.

STIPS Examples

NOTE: If you do not have environment variables pointing to the location of your Pandeia data, STIPS data, and Webbpsf data, you must set these environment variables using os.environ or other equivalent method prior to running any of these example scripts.


This work is supported by the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, Grant Number U24TR002306. This work is solely the responsibility of the creators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.