PhoSim Tutorial 3: How to simulate a single star

To simulate a single star with PhoSim via the command line simply do:

phosim examples/star -c examples/nobackground

The process should complete in less than a minute and then a series of output files will be produced There are two types of output images: raw amplifier images (output/....a.fits.gz) and electron images (output/....e.fits.gz) which are the image of the electrons prior to readout (not possible in real life). The amplifier images are similar to what would be obtained at an actual telescope. However, the electron images will have many of the more basic readout effects removed (gain/offsets) that are often the first step of a calibration pipeline. Therefore, most users have found the electron images more useful to just getting started.

The images may be examined with ds9 or other FITS tools or with various packages common in astronomical research. With DS9 you can look at the output image by using this command:

ds9 output/generic_e_9999_*.fits.gz

Here is what the chip image from the example should look like (zoomed in X4 and in log scale):