For documentation and installation instructions please visit https://stips.readthedocs.io
STIPS is the Space Telescope Imaging Product Simulator. It is designed to create simulations of full-detector post-pipeline astronomical scenes for the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's Wide-Field Instrument (WFI). STIPS has the ability to add instrumental distortion (if available) as well as calibration residuals from flatfields, dark currents, and cosmic rays. It automatically includes Poisson noise and readout noise. It does not include instrument saturation effects.
STIPS is intended to produce quick simulations that are corrected for distortion, but not mosaicked.
We note there is no equivalent flight product, since Roman Level 3 (L3) files are both distortion
corrected and mosaicked, while Level 2 (L2) files are neither. STIPS is ideal for
cases where Pandeia <https://pypi.org/project/pandeia.engine/>_ does not
provide a large enough simulation area (e.g., full-detector or multiple-detector
observations). STIPS obtains its Roman instrument and filter values from
Pandeia, so it should produce output within 10% of output produced by Pandeia.
STIPS does not start with Level 1 (L1) images and propagate instrumental calibrations through the simulations. While it does have the ability to add error residuals (representing the remaining uncertainty after pipeline calibration), these residuals are not validated against actual pipeline calibrations of L1 images. STIPS is not the ideal choice if extremely good instrumental accuracy is needed. Pandeia is the preferred tool for high-accuracy observations.
Developed by Brian York (@york-stsci), Robel Geda (@robelgeda), and O. Justin Otor (@ojustino). Python ePSF code developed by Sebastian Gomez (@gmzsebastian) based on Fortran code developed by Andrea Bellini (@AndreaBellini).
If you use STIPS, please cite the STIPS PASP Paper that describes the code.
@ARTICLE{2024PASP..136l4502S,
author = {{Stips Development Team} and {Gomez}, Sebastian and {Bellini}, Andrea and {Al-Kowsi}, Hanna and {Desjardins}, Tyler and {Geda}, Robel and {Han}, Eunkyu and {Otor}, O. Justin and {Riedel}, Adric and {Ryan}, Russell and {Spitzer}, Isaac and {York}, Brian},
title = "{STIPS: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Imaging Product Simulator}",
journal = {\pasp},
keywords = {Astronomical techniques, Telescopes, Astronomical methods, 1684, 1689, 1043, Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
year = 2024,
month = dec,
volume = {136},
number = {12},
eid = {124502},
pages = {124502},
doi = {10.1088/1538-3873/ad9524},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
eprint = {2411.11978},
primaryClass = {astro-ph.IM},
adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024PASP..136l4502S},
adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}