End-to-end simulations with SIXTE: workshop 2024

                   6 (13:00 CEST) - 8 (13:30 CEST) November 2024 

 NEW!: Released (tentative) timetable

The SIXTE team  is happy to announce its next hands-on workshop, following the previous SIXTE workshops in Toulouse, France (2016), Bamberg, Germany (2018), Cambridge, MA, USA (2018) and Santander, Spain (2019) and virtual (2022).

SIXTE is a software package for simulations of X-ray observations, which is used as the official end-to-end simulator for both current and future X-ray missions such as eROSITA and NewAthena. It can also be used as a tool for writing observing proposals for missions such as XRISM, as well as for the scientific analysis of existing observations with strong instrumental effects such as pileup.

The focus of the workshop is an introduction of SIXTE, including new features that were added to the next major release of SIXTE, SIXTE version 3. The workshop is therefore well suited to both, experienced and new users of SIXTE. A focus of the workshop will be on simulations for XRISM Resolve and Xtend and NewAthena WFI and X-IFU, as well on other future X-ray missions.

We will demonstrate these changes with simulations for NewAthena WFI and X-IFU, XRISM Resolve and Xtend as well as future X-ray missions.

After the introduction of the tools, participants can also receive assistance for setting up their own, more involved, simulations for observation proposals or scientific analysis.

Contents of the workshop include:

1. General SIMPUT/SIXTE Introduction
2. Set-up and Tools Overview
3. SIXTE Implementation of the Mission
4. Practical Sessions:
   • First Simulations
   •  Analysis and Source Variability
   •  Survey Simulations
   •  Extended Source Simulations
   •  Observational Strategies (dithering, filters)
   • High Count-Rate Simulations and Branching Ratios

The intended audience are graduate students and scientists with a background in X-ray astronomy who are interested in performing simulations for Athena or similar observatories.

The workshop will take place in person, with free, but mandatory registration. Admission will be on a first-come, first-served basis, with the number of participants being limited to 40.

Limited travel and accommodation grants will be made available to early career researchers (please specify needs in the registration form). 

We encourage all participants to consider traveling by train, to help reduce our carbon footprint.

WORKSHOP INSTRUCTIONS

If you want to use the SciServer to run SIXTE - which we recommend- you will find a guide the materials section below on this web page. In brief:

• To get access to the SIXTE folder on SciServer, which includes the software and files for the tutorials, please send an E-Mail with your SciServer username to the SIXTE support list (sixte-support@lists.fau.de), preferably two working days before the workshop at the latest (on Monday).
• To create a compute container, follow the instructions in the above document until the test for SIXTE und SIMPUT by running 'sixteversion'.

To use SIXTE on your own machine, please make sure you are using the current version and that it is installed and running correctly before the workshop - due to the number of participants we will unfortunately not be able to fix installation issues during the workshop. You will also need to use up-to date instrument files. You can find all of these at the SIXTE web page.

To inspect FITS files and images, we recommend having a local installation of HEASoft and ds9 on your machine.

More information soon. Stay tuned!