November 5, 2024:  PhoSim v6.2 is available!


The 25th major release of the Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is completed, tagged, and validated as PhoSim v6.2 

Some highlights:

1)  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.

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

3)  We are continuing to create more tools/APIs related to machine learning/AI.

Release notes are at v6.2 release notes page.


Jul 11, 2024:  PhoSim v6.1.2 is available


Added new option to give a toy PSF an ellipticity with the toyg1 and toyg2 commands


May 30, 2024:  PhoSim v6.1.1 is available


Forgot new cfitsio file and Tess instrument files


May 24, 2024:  PhoSim v6.1 is available!


The 24th major release of the Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is completed, tagged, and validated as PhoSim v6.1!  Some highlights:


1)  PhoSim v6.1 has several new improvements.


    -The largest improvement is the complete ab initio physical implementation of coating interactions on all optical surfaces including a/r coatings, protective coatings, etc. and some augmentation of multilayer physics.  All coatings also allow for inhomogenous thickness, and the light responds accordingly.

    - We also updated various measuring tools, added more example catalogs, flexibility in the SED normalizing point, adjusted airglow levels, spectra, and variability based on careful photometric studies, implemented correlated time-dependence of aerosol distributions, added absorption in materials, and streamlined the installation scripts and dependencies to work on more systems.

    -The wide-field survey telescope (WFST) was implemented (W. Luo).

    -Various improvements were made to the Pan-STARRS implementation (G. Magnier).

    -The WIYN telescope coatings and contamination levels were implemented.

    -The Rubin optics coatings and contamination levels were completely redone replacing old methods.

    -There are a number of bug fixes and many new optimizations that improve performance as well.


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


3)  The fifth reference paper was completed.  Follow the technical links for more information.


4)  We are also creating more tools/APIs related to machine learning/AI.


5)  We're attempting to facilitate the implementation of many more telescopes much more rapidly, which some of the improvements simplify.    To do this, we are building a number of tools as well as simplifying the interfaces for implementation of telescopes.  Please contact us if you want to collaborate on any telescope.


Feb 14, 2024:  PhoSim v6.0.13 is available


Updated configure script to be bash compliant and updated cfitsio/fftw (EM)


Feb 7, 2024:  PhoSim v6.0.11 is available


Fixed Pan-Starrs optics files which led to out of focus images


Feb 2, 2024:  PhoSim v6.0.10 is available


Changed scripts to bash since some distributions of linux do not include csh


Dec 13, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.9 is available


Expanded and made more accurate microroughness array


Dec 12, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.8 is available


Fixed bug in new coordinate system for user specified perturbations


Oct 23, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.6 is available


Fixes pupil screen resampling which caused JWST error


Sep 8, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.5 is available


Fixes rare bug for transmission of uncoated surfaces transmission


Aug 23, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.4 is available


Fixes the optimization for monochromatic SEDs 


Jul 19, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.2 is available


Fixes array size for much larger screens.


Jul 12, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0.1 is available


Fixes an error in scattering normalization


Jul 11, 2023:  PhoSim v6.0 is available!


The 23rd major release of the Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is completed, tagged, and validated as PhoSim Six (PhoSim v6.0)!  A few announcements:

1)  PhoSim Six has significant improvements in performance.  You should notice typically 33% improvements in speed, depending on your computing architecture and telescope & settings.  There are a number of changes that made this possible, and the improvements should allow us to continue to improve on performance in upcoming releases.  PhoSim Six also implements both a complete physical simulation of microroughness and  a self-consistent physical interaction of contamination (see below).    There are a number of bug fixes as well.

2)  The documentation has been migrated to a single site that has the address:


https://www.phosim.org


This should allow us much more flexibility and it should be much easier to find what you need.  The downloads, issue tracking and the repository itself will still be at the bitbucket site, but all of the documentation will move to phosim.org.  Please link to this new site, so we can continue to grow PhoSim.

3)   We are building a page with links to other codes the either:  1) produce phosim inputs,  2) produce phosim outputs or 3) embed phosim in an analysis loop.   If you have a code that does any of these, please reach out and we can add your link and work to modify aspects of the APIs to make it work easier for you as well.