SIMIO-continuum: Connecting simulations to ALMA observations

Abstract

Interferometric observations sample the visibility space of the targeted source. Thus, procedures for image reconstruction are needed to obtain images from those observations. Several factors are involved in the detectability of physical features in a reconstructed image, such as the angular resolution of the observation, point spread function, noise level, and the assumptions of the reconstruction algorithm. The most robust way to test the observability of simulated emission features is by taking a simulated image and reconstructing it with the same algorithms. SIMIO-continuum takes simulated images of continuum emission in millimeter wavelengths and returns the synthetic observation and reconstructed images as if the input image had been observed in the sky with an existing interferometric observation. The documentation and tutorials give a detailed description of the code functionalities and syntax, with publicly available datasets for reproducibility.