Photon Simulator (PhoSim)

The Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is a set of very fast photon Monte Carlo codes designed to simulate light through telescopes. PhoSim does this by generating photons from astrophysical objects and then propagating photons through the atmosphere, a telescope, and a camera. The atmosphere is represented using self-consistent hydrodynamic descriptions, the optics follow elasticity theory calculations, and the sensors are represented with electrostatic physics. PhoSim generates images by recording the number of electrons ending up in a given pixel. A number of past, present, and future observatories are implemented. PhoSim uses a number of novel efficient numerical techniques and is multithreaded. PhoSim has a graphical user interface and more details can be found at https://bitbucket.org/phosim/phosim_release/wiki/Hom