spotter

Approximate forward models of fluxes and spectra time-series of non-uniform stars

spotter serves as a flexible, low-level backend for scientific applications that require modeling stellar surfaces using spherical pixelation. While it is not a comprehensive simulation suite like StarSim or SOAP, spotter provides core building blocks for custom workflows, including:

• Modeling surface features (e.g., stellar spots or faculae) with arbitrary shapes
• Forward modeling of stellar surface flux, spectra, radial velocities, and CCFs
• Simulation of observables during transits by stellar or planetary companions
• Gaussian process frameworks for representing stellar surfaces and modeling their flux time series

spotter uses the HEALPix subdivision scheme and is powered by the high-performance numerical package JAX, enabling its use on multiple CPUs and accelerators like GPUs and TPUs.

Documentation can be found at spotter.readthedocs.io

Installation

To install spotter from pypi

pip install spotter

To get the latest version under development, clone the repository and install the package using pip:

git clone https://github.com/lgrcia/spotter
pip install -e spotter