PySM generates full-sky simulations of Galactic foregrounds in intensity and polarization relevant for CMB experiments. The components simulated are thermal dust, synchrotron, AME, free-free, and CMB at a given Nside, with an option to integrate over a top hat bandpass, to add white instrument noise, and to smooth with a given beam. PySM is based on the large-scale Galactic part of Planck Sky Model code and uses some of its inputs.

Pixell loads, manipulates, and analyzes maps stored in rectangular pixelization. It is mainly targeted for use with maps of the sky (e.g., CMB intensity and polarization maps, stacks of 21 cm intensity maps, binned galaxy positions or shear) in cylindrical projection, but its core functionality is more general. It extends numpy's ndarray to an ndmap class that associates a World Coordinate System (WCS) with a numpy array. It includes tools for Fourier transforms (through numpy or pyfft) and spherical harmonic transforms (through libsharp2 (ascl:1402.033)) of such maps and tools for visualization (through the Python Image Library).