GalCraft: Building integral-field spectrograph data cubes of the Milky Way

GalCraft is a flexible software to create mock IFS observations of the Milky Way and other hydrodynamical/N-body simulations. It is entirely written in Python3 and conducts all the procedures from inputting data and spectral templates to the output of IFS data cubes in fits format.

The produced mock data cubes can be analyzed in the same way as real IFS observations by many methods, particularly codes like Voronoi binning (Cappellari & Copin 2003), Penalized Pixel-Fitting (pPXF, Cappellari & Emsellem 2004; Cappellari 2017, 2023), line-strength indices (e.g., Worthey 1994; Schiavon 2007; Thomas et al. 2011; Martín-Navarro et al. 2018), or a combination of them such as the GIST pipeline (Bittner et al. 2019) and nGIST (Fraser-McKelvie et al. 2025).

An elaborate, Python-native parallelization is implemented and tested on various machines from laptops to cluster scales.

Installation

Using pip

pip install GalCraft

From the git repo

git clone https://github.com/purmortal/galcraft.git
cd galcraft
pip install .

Example

Follow the commands below to download test kit:

wget https://github.com/purmortal/galcraft/archive/refs/heads/test_kit.zip
unzip test_kit.zip
cd galcraft-test_kit/tests/

Then generate your first mock data using GalCraft command:

GalCraft --config test_kit --default-dir configFiles/defaultDir

The data cubes are saved into ./output/test_kit/

Documentation

A detailed documentation of GalCraft will be available soon.

Citing GalCraft

If you use this software framework for any publication, please cite both the original paper Wang et al. (2024), which describes the method and its application to mock Milky Way observations, and the corresponding ASCL reference.

@ARTICLE{Wang2024MNRAS,
       author = {{Wang}, Zixian and {Sharma}, Sanjib and {Hayden}, Michael R. and {van de Sande}, Jesse and {Bland-Hawthorn}, Joss and {Vaughan}, Sam and {Martig}, Marie and {Pinna}, Francesca},
        title = "{Validating full-spectrum fitting with a synthetic integral-field spectroscopic observation of the Milky Way}",
      journal = {\mnras},
     keywords = {Astrophysics - Astrophysics of Galaxies, Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics},
         year = 2024,
        month = oct,
       volume = {534},
       number = {2},
        pages = {1175-1204},
          doi = {10.1093/mnras/stae2148},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
       eprint = {2310.18258},
 primaryClass = {astro-ph.GA},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024MNRAS.534.1175W},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

@software{Wang2024ascl,
       author = {{Wang}, Zixian},
        title = "{GalCraft: Building integral-field spectrograph data cubes of the Milky Way}",
 howpublished = {Astrophysics Source Code Library, record ascl:2410.001},
         year = 2024,
        month = oct,
          eid = {ascl:2410.001},
archivePrefix = {ascl},
       eprint = {2410.001},
       adsurl = {https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024ascl.soft10001W},
      adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

License

This software is governed by the MIT License. In brief, you can use, distribute, and change this package as you want.

Contact

• Zixian Wang (wang.zixian.astro@gmail.com)
• Michael Hayden (mrhayden@ou.edu)
• Sanjib Sharma (ssharma@stsci.edu)