The FluxCompensator: Making Radiative Transfer Models of hydrodynamical Simulations Directly Comparable to Real Observations

TL;DR

The FluxCompensator is an open-source Python tool that transforms radiative transfer simulation outputs into realistic synthetic observations, accounting for observational effects like PSF, noise, and reddening, to enable direct comparison with real astronomical data.

Contribution

This paper introduces the FluxCompensator, a novel Python package that simulates observational effects on radiative transfer models for better comparison with real data.

Findings

Successfully generates synthetic observations mimicking real telescopes.

Can process existing observational data for consistency checks.

Enables direct comparison between models and observations.

Abstract

When modeling astronomical objects throughout the universe, it is important to correctly treat the limitations of the data, for instance finite resolution and sensitivity. In order to simulate these effects, and to make radiative transfer models directly comparable to real observations, we have developed an open-source Python package called the FluxCompensator that enables the post-processing of the output of 3-d Monte-Carlo radiative transfer codes, such as HYPERION. With the FluxCompensator, realistic synthetic observations can be generated by modelling the effects of convolution with arbitrary point-spread functions (PSFs), transmission curves, finite pixel resolution, noise and reddening. Pipelines can be applied to compute synthetic observations that simulate observatories, such as the Spitzer Space Telescope or the Herschel Space Observatory. Additionally, this tool can read in existing observations (e.g. FITS format) and use the same settings for the synthetic observations. In this paper, we describe the package as well as present examples of such synthetic observations.