Argosim

argosim is a lightweight, modular, and open-source Python package for simulating radio interferometric observations. It is developed as part of the ARGOS project, a European initiative to build a next-generation, sustainable radio interferometer.

✨ Key Features

• 📡 Antenna array simulation – Generate custom arrays or load predefined layouts.
• 🔭 Aperture synthesis – Compute baseline distributions and uv-sampling masks.
• 🌀 Sky model generation – Create or load input sky models.
• 🧼 Dirty beam and image reconstruction – Simulate dirty observations and reconstruct images using CLEAN.
• 📊 Beam and image quality metrics – Evaluate beam shape, sidelobe level, and image fidelity.
• ⚡ JAX backend – Accelerated, differentiable computations for high-performance and ML applications.
• 🐳 Docker support – Easy reproducibility and cross-platform compatibility.

⚡ JAX & differentiability

The imaging forward model — baselines, UV-track generation, Kaiser–Bessel convolutional gridding, FFT — is implemented end-to-end in JAX, so the path from antenna positions all the way to the dirty image is differentiable. Combined with an optax optimiser, this turns array layout design into a gradient-based problem: you can directly minimise a loss on the dirty beam (or any downstream observable) with respect to the antenna coordinates.

The animation below shows 20 antennas being optimised with Adam to match a Gaussian target beam, under multiple physical constraints (minimum spacing, maximum site radius). The reusable building blocks live in argosim.optim_utils; see notebooks/layout_optimisation.ipynb for the full example.

🚀 Getting Started

Installation

You can install the latest version of argosim via pip:

pip install argosim

Or use the development version directly from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/ARGOS-telescope/argosim.git
cd argosim
pip install -e .

Dependencies

• Python 3.11+
• NumPy, Matplotlib, JAX, scikit-image
• PyQt6 (optional, for running the GUI)

🖥️ Graphical User Interface (GUI)

argosim provides an optional PyQt6-based GUI for interactive simulations. It supports array configuration, uv-coverage visualization, and imaging—all without writing code.

Ideal for education, outreach, and rapid prototyping.

Running the GUI requires PyQt6 which can be installed as follows:

pip install "argosim[gui]"

To launch the GUI and have access to the custom templates you need to clone the argosim repository:

git clone https://github.com/ARGOS-telescope/argosim.git
cd argosim

Launch the GUI with:

python app/argosim-gui.py

📚 Documentation

Comprehensive documentation is available at:

https://argos-telescope.github.io/argosim/

📖 Tutorials

Four interactive Jupyter notebooks are provided to help you get started:

1. Antenna Array Simulation
2. Aperture Synthesis
3. Image reconstruction
4. CLEAN deconvolution

These notebooks cover the main functionalities of argosim and provide practical examples.

🐳 Docker

A pre-built Docker image is available:

docker pull ghcr.io/argos-telescope/argosim:main

This ensures reproducibility and simplifies setup across different environments.

🛠️ Development

We use continuous integration to maintain code quality and robustness:

• Unit tests with pytest
• Linting with black and isort
• Documentation building with sphinx

📢 Citation

If you use argosim in your research, please cite it as follows:

@software{argosim,
  author = {Ezequiel Centofanti and Emma Ayçoberry and Samuel Farrens and Samuel Gullin and Manal Bensahli and Jean-Luc Starck and John Antoniadis},
  title = {argosim: a Python package for radio interferometric simulations},
  version = {2.0.0},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/ARGOS-telescope/argosim}
}

fill in the version number with the current version of argosim.

This software is developed at the CosmoStat laboratory, CEA, Paris-Saclay, in collaboration with the ARGOS project.

📬 Contact

For questions, bugs, or feature requests, feel free to open an issue.