PhoSim Tutorial 19: How to Simulate a Drift Scan Telescope

PhoSim automatically corrects for the rotation of the sky relative to the telescope due to the Earth's rotation. PhoSim also can add a residual error due to the tracking imperfections. However, PhoSim can also turn all of this off for systems that do not use tracking, but instead clock their detectors to effectively cancel the rotation. This is known as drift scanning.

To demonstrate these capabilities we start with a simple catalog like the following.

rightascension 0.0

declination 0.0

filter 2

obstime 10.0

stars 15.0 30.0 0.2

galaxies 15.0 30.0 0.2

Using following command,

phosim catalog -c examples/nobackground

We obtain the following image.