Professional astronomers don't make discoveries by looking through an eyepiece like you might with a backyard telescope. Instead, they collect digital images in massive cameras attached to large telescopes. Just as you might have an endless library of digital photos stored in your cellphone, many astronomers collect more photos than they would ever have the time to look at. Instead, astronomers like me look at some of the images, then build algorithms and later use computers to combine and analyze the rest. But how can we know that the algorithms we write will work, when we don't even have time to look at all the images' We can practice on some of the images, but one new way to build the best algorithms is to simulate some fake images as accurately as possible. My research group and collaborators have found that the best way to create fake but realistic astronomical images is to painstakingly simulate light and its interaction with everything it encounters. Light is composed of...
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