Welcome to the documentation of the SPARC4 Artificial Image Simulator (AIS)

Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), in collaboration with Laboratório Nacional de Astrofísica (LNA), developed the Simultaneous Polarimeter and Rapid Camera in Four Bands (SPARC4), a new astronomical instrument currently installed on the Perkin-Elmer 1.6 m telescope of Picos dos Dias Observatory (in Portuguese, OPD). SPARC4 allows simultaneous photometric and polarimetric acquisitions in four spectral bands, which are similar to the g, r, i, and z bands of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) system. For image acquisition, four Frame Transfer (FT) Electron Multiplying Charged Coupled Device (EMCCD) iXon Ultra 888 cameras of 1024 x 1024 pixels of 13 μm, produced by Oxford Instruments, are used. These cameras have a window and a cotaing optimized for their spectral band operation. For polarimetric acquisitions, SPARC4 uses the dual-beam technique, in wich the light is split into the ordinary and extraordinary polarimetric components and are simultaneously acquired by the EMCCD cameras. The Artificial Image Simulator (AIS) is a software developed using the Python programming language to create artificial images of stars that are similar to the images acquired using SPARC4. For this simulation, AIS firstly models the Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) the star. Over this distribution, the spectral response contributions of the atmosphere, telescope and the instrument itself are considered. This result in then integrated over the wavelength, providing us with the number of photons per second acquired by the cameras. This number is used to create the Point Spread Function (PSF) of the star, modeled as a Gaussian 2D distribution, according to the size of the seeing disk. This PSF distribtuion is summed pixel-by-pixel to a background image, calculated according to the contributions of the sky as well as the bias level, read noise, and dark current noise of the cameras. In this work, we present a comprehensive description about how to use AIS and the aspectes related to its development. The [Quick Start](quick_start.md) section presents a brief review for starting to use AIS. For a more extensive description, visit the [Tutorial](tutorial.md) section. The [API](./api/) section presents the classes that compound AIS. The [Contribution](contribute.md) section explains how you can contribute to this work. The [Authors and Contact](authors.md) section presents the authors responsible for this development.