Authors: Adri J. Duivenvoorden and Jon E. Gudmundsson

contact: adriaand@princeton.edu

Simulate the scanning of the CMB sky while incorporating realistic beams and scan strategies.

This code uses (spin-)spherical harmonic representations of the (polarized) beam response and sky to generate simulated CMB detector signal timelines. Beams can be arbitrarily shaped. Pointing timelines can be read in or calculated on the fly. Optionally, the results can be binned on the sphere.

The code and some results based on its use are described in: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.05034

See example scripts beamconv/test.py and Jupyter notebooks in notebooks. In particular, we suggest that the user try running notebooks/introduction.ipynb followed by notebooks/simple_scan.ipynb.

Apart from the standard libraries, NumPy, Healpy, and Matplotlib, this code makes use of qpoint, a lightweight quaternion-based library for telescope pointing, written by Sasha Rahlin. The code has been tested with Python 2.7 and 3.6.

python setup.py install --user

or, when using pip and virtuelenv:

pip install .

Run tests:

python -m pytest tests

Testing requires the pytest package, this can be automatically obtained during installation by running:

pip install .[test]

Consider adding the -e flag to the pip install command to enable automatic updating of code changes when developing.