Documentation of iact-estimator#
iact-estimator is a Python3 package which allows
to evaluate the ability of an IACT telescope system
to detect a gamma-ray source.
It started from legacy scripts used by the MAGIC telescopes collaboration to aid users in the development of their observation proposals.
About#
The output is an estimate of what kind of signal can be observed by the telescope system given a spectral shape. The signal significances of each spectral point are computed according to Eq. 17 definition from [2].
The currently available performance data shipped with the package is:
Current caveats#
the tool is operating on estimated energy doing simple comparisons with differential in estimated energy rates seen for the Crab Nebula; for softer sources the differences in energy migration will result in different performance than the ones produced by this tool
the treatment of extended sources is very approximate, only the increase in background is taken into account (without energy dependence of Point Spread Function); for extended sources with extension >~ 0.4 deg the dependence on the offset from the centre of the camera will further worsen the performance w.r.t. one produced by this tool
significances are given for each differential energy bin separately, but to detect a source one normally applies a cut that keeps a broad range of energies inside resulting in better integral sensitivity than differential one; also, optimization of cuts for a broad energy range usually results in somewhat better sensitivity than what one can get by simply integrating the used here signal in differential energy bins; as a very crude approximation for detection capability we calculate here also a sum of significances of all the points in Spectral Energy Distribution divided by the sqrt of the number of those points