mariaNovel Simulator for Large Single Dish Telescopes
We developed a versatile, user-friendly simulator — named maria — to optimize scanning strategies and instrument designs to efficiently reduce atmospheric noise and filtering effects. We utilize this tool to generate synthetic time streams and maps from hydrodynamical simulations, facilitating a fair comparison between theory and reality. See this and this talk for more info! For a detailed description of the tool and tutorials on how to use it, please visit www.thomaswmorris.com/maria.
Key Papers:
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Quantifying Atmospheric Emission above Cerro Toco.
maria: A novel simulator for forecasting (sub-)mm observations
The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Modeling bulk atmospheric motion
Related Works:
maria goes NIFTy
Utalizing maria, we developed a machine-learning framework for denoising single-dish submillimeter data, based on the NIFTy Gaussian process library. This approach jointly models atmospheric and astronomical signals within a Bayesian framework. We extended the framework—trained on maria—to handle real bolometric single-dish data, marking the first application of this kind in submillimeter mapmaking. Initial results were presented at two international conferences this summer, with a conference proceeding now available as a preprint.
Key Papers: