Empirical spec phot

[tcjansen]

A place for comments on this example!

The purpose of this example is to take a real spectrum and perform synthetic photometry on it with synphot.

[bmorris3]

This demo looks great so far! I look forward to working with you to get the predicted mags closer to the observed mags 😄

[bmorris3]

It'd be great to have some more info in the readme – perhaps a link to your blog, plus a link to the projects page to point out your goals/progress?

[eteq]

I said this on Slack but I figure I should have it here for completeness. Will try to do more of a review later, but some initially thoughts:

• within 30% or so is a really good sign! And surely meets the baseline "telescopy" intent of something good enough for the "is my proposal in the right ballpark?" question.
• I wonder if the mirror/instrument is the missing piece? I.e., is the SVO SDSS curve atmosphere + filter, or total throughput with everything included? That might show some of the difference
• If the seeing is dramatically different between the spec and phot observations that might matter at this level. See the spectrophotometry and seeing pages from SDSS for more on that

[tcjansen]

I wonder if the mirror/instrument is the missing piece? I.e., is the SVO SDSS curve atmosphere + filter, or total throughput with everything included? That might show some of the difference

Quoting from the e-mail conversation @bmorris3 and I had with Carlos Rodrigo at SVO, "the [filter curves] that [SVO] provide are the ones including not only the filter transmission but
also the full system response from atmosphere to detector", so I don't think the error can be attributed to that unfortunately.

[bmorris3]

It'd be great if you introduced effstim before you used it. When I first encountered it, for example, I wasn't sure what it abbreviated, and what calculation it was doing under-the-hood.

[pllim]

It is documented at https://synphot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/synphot/formulae.html#effective-stimulus . FYI.

[bmorris3]

Little style nitpick: Python files should end with a blank newline.

[tcjansen]

Hmm I'm not sure why github isn't showing my last blank line, as they're definitely there in my text editor (sublime text)...