The Spherical Harmonic Discrete Ordinate Method (SHDOM) radiative transfer model computes polarized monochromatic or spectral band radiative transfer in a one, two, or three-dimensional medium for either collimated solar and/or thermal emission sources of radiation. The model is written in a variant of Fortran 77 and in Fortran90 and requires a Fortran 90 compiler. Also included are programs for generating the optical property files input to SHDOM from physical properties of water cloud particles and aerosols.

shear-stacking calculates stacked shear profiles and tests based upon them, e.g. consistency for different slices of lensed background galaxies. The basic concept is that the lensing signal in terms of surface mass density (instead of shear) should be entirely determined by the properties of the lens sample and have no dependence on source galaxy properties.

The photometric redshift-aided classification pipeline SHEEP uses ensemble learning to classify astronomical sources into galaxies, quasars and stars. It uses tabular data and also allows the use of sparse data. The approach uses SDSS and WISE photometry, but SHEEP can also be used with other types of tabular data, such as radio fluxes or magnitudes.

SHELLSPEC calculates lightcurves, spectra and images of interacting binaries and extrasolar planets immersed in a moving circumstellar environment which is optically thin. It solves simple radiative transfer along the line of sight in moving media. The assumptions include LTE and optional known state quantities and velocity fields in 3D. Optional (non)transparent objects such as a spot, disc, stream, jet, shell or stars as well as an empty space may be defined (embedded) in 3D and their composite synthetic spectrum calculated. Roche model can be used as a boundary condition for the radiative tranfer. A related code based on SHELLSPEC, Pyshellspec (ascl:2106.006), solves the inverse problem of finding the stellar and orbital parameters.

Current and upcoming wide-field, ground-based, broad-band imaging surveys promise to address a wide range of outstanding problems in galaxy formation and cosmology. Several such uses of ground-based data, especially weak gravitational lensing, require highly precise measurements of galaxy image statistics with careful correction for the effects of the point-spread function (PSF). The SHERA (SHEar Reconvolution Analysis) software simulates ground-based imaging data with realistic galaxy morphologies and observing conditions, starting from space-based data (from COSMOS, the Cosmological Evolution Survey) and accounting for the effects of the space-based PSF. This code simulates ground-based data, optionally with a weak lensing shear applied, in a model-independent way using a general Fourier space formalism. The utility of this pipeline is that it allows for a precise, realistic assessment of systematic errors due to the method of data processing, for example in extracting weak lensing galaxy shape measurements or galaxy radial profiles, given user-supplied observational conditions and real galaxy morphologies. Moreover, the simulations allow for the empirical test of error estimates and determination of parameter degeneracies, via generation of many noise maps. The public release of this software, along with a large sample of cleaned COSMOS galaxy images (corrected for charge transfer inefficiency), should enable upcoming ground-based imaging surveys to achieve their potential in the areas of precision weak lensing analysis, galaxy profile measurement, and other applications involving detailed image analysis.

This code is no longer maintained and has been superseded by GalSim (ascl:1402.009).

The end-to-end SHERLOCK (Searching for Hints of Exoplanets fRom Lightcurves Of spaCe-based seeKers) pipeline allows users to explore data from space-based missions to search for planetary candidates. It can recover alerted candidates by the automatic pipelines such as SPOC and the QLP, Kepler objects of interest (KOIs) and TESS objects of interest (TOIs), and can search for candidates that remain unnoticed due to detection thresholds, lack of data exploration, or poor photometric quality. SHERLOCK has six different modules to perform its tasks; these modules can be executed by filling in an initial YAML file with some basic information and using a few lines of code sequentially to pass from one step to the next. Alternatively, the user may provide with the light curve in a csv file, where the time, normalized flux, and flux error are provided in columns in comma-separated format.

Sherpa is the CIAO (ascl:1311.006) modeling and fitting application made available by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC). It can be used for analysis of images, spectra and time series from many telescopes, including optical telescopes such as Hubble. Sherpa is flexible, modular and extensible. It has an IPython user interface and it is also an importable Python module. Sherpa models, optimization and statistic functions are available via both C++ and Python for software developers wishing to link such functions directly to their own compiled code.

The CIAO 4.3 Sherpa release supports fitting of 1-D X-ray spectra from Chandra and other X-ray missions, as well as 1-D non-X-ray data, including ASCII data arrays, radial profiles, and lightcurves. The options for grating data analysis include fitting the spectrum with multiple response files required for overlapping orders in LETG observations. Modeling of 2-D spatial data is fully supported, including the PSF and exposure maps. User specified models can be added to Sherpa with advanced "user model" functionality.

SHTOOLS performs (among others) spherical harmonic transforms and reconstructions, rotations of spherical harmonic coefficients, and multitaper spectral analyses on the sphere. The package accommodates any standard normalization of the spherical harmonic functions ("geodesy" 4π normalized, Schmidt semi-normalized, orthonormalized, and unnormalized), and either real or complex spherical harmonics can be employed. Spherical harmonic transforms are calculated by exact quadrature rules using either (1) the sampling theorem of Driscoll and Healy (1994) where data are equally sampled (or spaced) in latitude and longitude, or (2) Gauss-Legendre quadrature. A least squares inversion routine for irregularly sampled data is included as well. The Condon-Shortley phase factor of (-1)m can be used or excluded with the associated Legendre functions. The spherical harmonic transforms are accurate to approximately degree 2800, corresponding to a spatial resolution of better than 4 arc minutes. Routines are included for performing localized multitaper spectral analyses and standard gravity calculations, such as computation of the geoid, and the determination of the potential associated with finite-amplitude topography. The routines are fast. Spherical harmonic transforms and reconstructions take on the order of 1 second for bandwidths less than 600 and about 3 minutes for bandwidths close to 2800.

Shwirl visualizes spectral data cubes with meaningful coloring methods. The program has been developed to investigate transfer functions, which combines volumetric elements (or voxels) to set the color, and graphics shaders, functions used to compute several properties of the final image such as color, depth, and/or transparency, as enablers for scientific visualization of astronomical data. The program uses Astropy (ascl:1304.002) to handle FITS files and World Coordinate System, Qt (and PyQt) for the user interface, and VisPy, an object-oriented Python visualization library binding onto OpenGL.

sic (Sparse Inpainting Code) generates Gaussian, isotropic CMB realizations, masks them, and recovers the large-scale masked data using sparse inpainting; it is written in Fortran90.

sick infers astrophysical parameters from noisy observed spectra. Phenomena that can alter the data (e.g., redshift, continuum, instrumental broadening, outlier pixels) are modeled and simultaneously inferred with the astrophysical parameters of interest. This package relies on emcee (ascl:1303.002); it is best suited for situations where a grid of model spectra already exists, and one would like to infer model parameters given some data.

SICON (Stokes Inversion based on COnvolutional Neural networks) provides a three-dimensional cube of thermodynamical and magnetic properties from the interpretation of two-dimensional maps of Stokes profiles by use of a convolutional neural network. In addition to being much faster than parallelized inversion codes, SICON, when trained on synthetic Stokes profiles from two numerical simulations of different structures of the solar atmosphere, also provided a three-dimensional view of the physical properties of the region of interest in geometrical height, and pressure and Wilson depression properties that are decontaminated from the blurring effect of instrumental point spread functions.

Self-Interacting Dark Matter (SIDM) is a hypothetical model for cold dark matter in the Universe. A strong interaction between dark matter particles introduce a different physics inside dark-matter haloes, making the density profile cored, reduce the number of subhaloes, and trigger gravothermal collapse. sidm-nbody is an N-body simulation code with Direct Simulation Monte Carlo scattering for self interaction, and some codes to analyse gravothermal collapse of isolated haloes. The N-body simulation is based on GADGET 1.1.

The SIDM model combines the isothermal Jeans model and the model of adiabatic halo contraction into a simple semi-analytic procedure for computing the density profile of self-interacting dark-matter (SIDM) haloes with the gravitational influence from the inhabitant galaxies. It agrees well with cosmological SIDM simulations over the entire core-forming stage and up to the onset of gravothermal core-collapse. The fast speed of the method facilitates analyses that would be challenging for numerical simulations.

SiFTO is an empirical method for modeling Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) light curves by manipulating a spectral template. We make use of high-redshift SN data when training the model, allowing us to extend it bluer than rest-frame U. This increases the utility of our high-redshift SN observations by allowing us to use more of the available data. We find that when the shape of the light curve is described using a stretch prescription, applying the same stretch at all wavelengths is not an adequate description. SiFTO therefore uses a generalization of stretch which applies different stretch factors as a function of both the wavelength of the observed filter and the stretch in the rest-frame B band. SiFTO has been compared to other published light-curve models by applying them to the same set of SN photometry, and it's been demonstrated that SiFTO and SALT2 perform better than the alternatives when judged by the scatter around the best-fit luminosity distance relationship. When SiFTO and SALT2 are trained on the same data set the cosmological results agree.

SIGPROC is a package designed to standardize the initial analysis of the many types of fast-sampled pulsar data. Currently recognized machines are the Wide Band Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP), the Penn State Pulsar Machine (PSPM), the Arecibo Observatory Fourier Transform Machine (AOFTM), the Berkeley Pulsar Processors (BPP), the Parkes/Jodrell 1-bit filterbanks (SCAMP) and the filterbank at the Ooty radio telescope (OOTY). The SIGPROC tools should help users look at their data quickly, without the need to write (yet) another routine to read data or worry about big/little endian compatibility (byte swapping is handled automatically).

Silo reads and writes a wide variety of scientific data to binary disk files. The files Silo produces and the data within them can be easily shared and exchanged between wholly independently developed applications running on disparate computing platforms. Consequently, Silo facilitates the development of general purpose tools for processing scientific data. One of the more popular tools that process Silo data files is the VisIt visualization tool (ascl:1103.007).

Silo supports gridless (point) meshes, structured meshes, unstructured-zoo and unstructured-arbitrary-polyhedral meshes, block structured AMR meshes, constructive solid geometry (CSG) meshes, piecewise-constant (e.g., zone-centered) and piecewise-linear (e.g. node-centered) variables defined on the node, edge, face or volume elements of meshes as well as the decomposition of meshes into arbitrary subset hierarchies including materials and mixing materials. In addition, Silo supports a wide variety of other useful objects to address various scientific computing application needs. Although the Silo library is a serial library, it has features that enable it to be applied quite effectively and scalable in parallel.

The ESO's VLT/SPHERE instrument includes a unique long-slit spectroscopy (LSS) mode coupled with Lyot coronagraphy in its infrared dual-band imager and spectrograph (IRDIS) for spectral characterization of young, giant exoplanets detected by direct imaging. The SILSS pipeline is a combination of the official SPHERE pipeline and additional custom IDL routines developed within the SPHERE consortium for the speckle subtraction and spectral extraction of a companion's spectrum; it offers a complete end-to-end pipeline, from raw data (science+calibrations) to a final spectrum of the companion. SILSS works on both the low-resolution (LRS) and medium-resolution (MRS) data, and allows correction for some of the known biases of the instrument. Documentation is included in the header of the main routine of the pipeline.

The SIM5 library contains routines for relativistic raytracing and radiation transfer in GR. Written C with a Python interface, it has a special focus on raytracing from accretion disks, tori, hot spots or any other 3D configuration of matter in Kerr geometry, but it can be used with any other metric as well. It handles both optically thick and thin sources as well as transport of polarization of the radiation and calculates the propagation of light rays from the source to an observer through a curved spacetime. It supports parallelization and runs on GPUs.

SimAb (Simulating Abundances) simulates planet formation, focusing on the atmosphere accretion of gas giant planets. The package can run the simulation in two different modes. The single simulation mode is run by specifying the initial conditions (the core mass, the initial orbital distance, the planetesimal ratio, and the dust grain fraction), and the mature planet mass and orbital distance. The multi run simulation mode requires specifying the mass and the final orbital distance of the mature planet; the simulation randomly assigns initial orbital distance, initial core mass, initial planetesimal ratio, and initial dust grain fraction. The package also provides Jupyter codes for plotting the results of the simulations.

SIMBI simulates heterogeneous relativistic gas dynamics up to 3d for special relativistic hydrodynamics and up to 2D Newtonian hydrodynamics. It supports user-defined mesh expansion and contraction, density, momentum, and energy density terms outside of grid; the code also supports source terms in the Euler equations and source terms at the boundaries. Boundary conditions, which include periodic, reflecting, outflow, and inflow boundaries, are given as an array of strings. If an inflow boundary condition is set but no inflow boundary source terms are given, SIMBI switches to outflow boundary conditions to prevent crashes. The code can track a single passive scalar, insert an immersed boundary, and is impermeable by default. SIMBI USES the Cython framework to blend together C++, CUDA, HIP, and Python.

SimCADO simulates observations with any NIR/Vis imaging system. Though the package was originally designed to simulate images for the European Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) and MICADO, with the proper input, it is capable of simulating observations from many different telescope and instrument configurations.

SimFast 21 generates a simulation of the cosmological 21cm signal. While limited to low spatial resolution, the next generation low-frequency radio interferometers that target 21 cm observations during the era of reionization and prior will have instantaneous fields-of-view that are many tens of square degrees on the sky. Predictions related to various statistical measurements of the 21 cm brightness temperature must then be pursued with numerical simulations of reionization with correspondingly large volume box sizes, of order 1000 Mpc on one side. The authors pursued a semi-numerical scheme to simulate the 21 cm signal during and prior to Reionization by extending a hybrid approach where simulations are performed by first laying down the linear dark matter density field, accounting for the non-linear evolution of the density field based on second-order linear perturbation theory as specified by the Zel'dovich approximation, and then specifying the location and mass of collapsed dark matter halos using the excursion-set formalism. The location of ionizing sources and the time evolving distribution of ionization field is also specified using an excursion-set algorithm. They account for the brightness temperature evolution through the coupling between spin and gas temperature due to collisions, radiative coupling in the presence of Lyman-alpha photons and heating of the intergalactic medium, such as due to a background of X-ray photons. The method is capable of producing the required large volume simulations with adequate resolution in a reasonable time so a large number of realizations can be obtained with variations in assumptions related to astrophysics and background cosmology that govern the 21 cm signal.

SimLine computes the profiles of molecular rotational transitions and atomic fine structure lines in spherically symmetric clouds with arbitrary density, temperature and velocity structure. The code is designed towards a maximum flexibility and very high accuracy based on a completely adaptive discretization of all quantities. The code can treat arbitrary species in spherically symmetric configurations with arbitrary velocity structures and optical depths between about -5 and 5000. Moreover, SimLine includes the treatment of turbulence and clumping effects in a local statistical approximation combined with a radial dependence of the correlation parameters. The code consists of two parts: the self-consistent solution of the balance equations for all level populations and energy densities at all radial points and the computation of the emergent line profiles observed from a telescope with finite beam width and arbitrary offset.

SImMER (Stellar Image Maturation via Efficient Reduction) reduces astronomical imaging data. It performs standard dark-subtraction and flat-fielding operations on data from, for example, the ShARCS camera on the Shane 3-m telescope at Lick Observatory and the PHARO camera on the Hale 5.1-m telescope at Palomar Observatory; its object-oriented design allows the software to be extended to other instruments. SImMER can also perform sky-subtraction, image registration, FWHM measurement, and contrast curve calculation, and can generate tables and plots. For widely separated stars which are of somewhat equal brightness, a “wide binary” mode allows the user to selects which star is the primary around which each image should be centered.

This is an implementation of a fairly simple-minded luminosity distance fitter, intended for use with supernova data. The calculational technique is based on evaluating the $chi^2$ of the model fit on a grid and marginalization over various nuisance parameters. Of course, the nature of these things is that this code has gotten steadily more complex, so perhaps the simple moniker is no longer justified.

simple_reg_dem reconstructs differential emission measures (DEMs) in the solar corona. It overcomes issues, such as complexity, idiosyncratic output, convergence difficulty, and lack of speed, that exists in other methods. Initially written for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) data, the algorithm is notable for its simplicity, and is robust and extensible to any other wavelengths (e.g., X-rays) where the DEM treatment is valid. It is available in the SolarSoft (ascl:1208.013) package.

Made-to-measure (M2M) is a standard technique for modeling the dynamics of astrophysical systems in which the system is modeled with a set of N particles with weights that are slowly optimized to fit a set of constraints while integrating these particles forward in the gravitational potential. Simple-m2m extends this standard technique to allow parameters of the system other than the particle weights to be fit as well, including nuisance parameters that describe the observer's relation to the dynamical system (e.g., the inclination) or parameters describing an external potential.

SIMPLE (Simple Intensity Map Producer for Line Emission) generates intensity maps that include observational effects such as noise, anisotropic smoothing, sky subtraction, and masking. Written in Python, it is based on a lognormal simulation of galaxies and random assignment of luminosities to these galaxies and generates mock intensity maps that can be used to study survey systematics and calculate covariance matrices of power spectra. The code is modular, allowing its components to be used independently.

SimpLens illustrates some of the theoretical ideas important in gravitational lensing in an interactive way. After setting parameters for elliptical mass distribution and external mass, SimpLens displays the mass profile and source position, the lens potential and image locations, and indicate the image magnifications and contours of virtual light-travel time. A lens profile can be made shallower or steeper with little change in the image positions and with only total magnification affected.

simqso generates mock quasar spectra and photometry. Simulated quasar spectra are built from a series of components. Common quasar models are built-in, such as a broken power-law continuum model and Gaussian emission line templates; however, the code allows user-defined features to be included. Mock spectra are generated at arbitrary resolution and can be used to produce broadband photometry representative of a number of surveys.

The R-package SimSpin measures the kinematics of a galaxy simulation as if it had been observed using an IFU. The functions included in the package can produce a kinematic data cube and measure the "observables" from this data cube, specifically the observable spin parameter λr. This package, once installed, is fully documented and tested.

simulateSearch simulates high time-resolution data in radio astronomy. The code is built around producing multiple binary data files that contain information on the radiometer noise and sources that are being simulated. These binary data files subsequently get combined and output PSRFITS
search mode files produced. The PSRFITS files can be processed using standard pulsar software packages such as PRESTO (ascl:1107.017).

simuTrans models transit light curves affected by gravity-darkened stars. The code defines a star on a grid by modeling the brightness of each point as blackbody emission, then sets a series of parameters and uses emcee (ascl:1303.002) to explore the posterior probability distribution for the remaining fitted parameters and determine their best-fit values.

SIMX simulates a photon-counting detector's response to an input source, including a simplified model of any telescope. The code is not a full ray-trace, but a convolution tool that uses standard descriptions of telescope PSF (via either a simple Gaussian parameter, an energy-dependent encircled-energy function, or an image of the PSF) and the detector response (using the OGIP response function) to model how sources will appear. simx uses a predefined set of PSFs, vignetting information, and instrumental responses and outputs to make the simulation. It is designed to be a 'approximation' tool to estimate issues such as source confusion, background effects, pileup, and other similar issues.

The SINFONI pipeline reduces data from the Very Large Telescope's SINFONI (Spectrograph for INtegral Field Observations in the Near Infrared) instrument. It can evaluate the detector linearity and generate a corresponding non linear pixel map, create a master dark and a hot-pixel map, a master flat and a map of pixels which have intensities greater than a given threshold. It can also compute the optical distortions and slitlets distances, and perform wavelength calibration, PSF, telluric standard and other science data reduction, and can coadd bad pixel maps, collapse a cube to an image over a given wavelength range, perform cube arithmetics, among other useful tasks.

SofteningLength: Because Newton's law of Gravitation diverges as the relative separations |r'-r| tends to zero, it is common to add a positive constant λ also known as the "softening length", i.e. :

SingLe determines the appropriate value of this Softening Length λ for a given disc local structure (thickness 2h and vertical stratification ρ), in the axially symmetric, flat disc limit, preserving at best the Newtonian character of the gravitational potential and associated forces. Mass density ρ(z) is assumed to be locally expandable in the z-direction according to:

SIP (Systematics-Insensitive Periodograms) extends the generative model used to create traditional sine-fitting periodograms for finding the frequency of a sinusoid by including systematic trends based on a set of eigen light curves in the generative model in addition to using a sum of sine and cosine functions over a grid of frequencies, producing periodograms with vastly reduced systematic features. Acoustic oscillations in giant stars and measurement of stellar rotation periods can be recovered from the SIP periodograms without detrending. The code can also be applied to detection other periodic phenomena, including eclipsing binaries and short-period exoplanet candidates.

SIR is a general-purpose code capable of dealing with gradients of the physical quantities with height. It admits one and two-component model atmospheres. It allows the recovery of the stratification of the temperature, the magnetic field vector, and the line of sight velocity through the atmosphere, and the micro- and macroturbulence velocities - which are assumed to be constant with depth. It is based on the response functions, which enter a Marquardt nonlinear least-squares algorithm in a natural way. Response functions are calculated at the same time as the full radiative transfer equation for polarized light is integrated, which determines values of many free parameters in a reasonable computation time. SIR demonstrates high stability, accuracy, and uniqueness of results, even when simulated observations present signal-to-noise ratios of the order of the lowest acceptable values in real observations.

SIRENA (Software Ifca for Reconstruction of EveNts for Athena X-IFU) reconstructs the energy of incoming X-ray photons after their detection in the X-IFU TES detector. It is integrated in the SIXTE (ascl:1903.002) end-to-end simulations environment where it currently runs over SIXTE simulated data. This is done by means of a tool called tesreconstruction, which is mainly a wrapper to pass a data file to the SIRENA tasks.

SISPO (Space Imaging Simulator for Proximity Operations) simulates trajectories, light parameters, and camera intrinsic parameters for small solar system body fly-by and terrestrial planet surface missions. The software provides realistic surface rendering and realistic dust- and gas-environment optical models for comets and active asteroids and also simulates common image aberrations such as simple geometric distortions and tangential astigmatism. SISPO uses Blender and its Cycles rendering engine, which provides physically based rendering capabilities and procedural micropolygon displacement texture generation.

SISTER (Starshade Imaging Simulations Toolkit for Exoplanet Reconnaissance) predicts how an exoplanet system would look in an instrument that utilizes an Starshade to block the light from the host star. The tool allows for controlling a set of parameters of the whole instrument for: (1) the Starshade design, (2) the exoplanetary system, (3) the telescope and (4) the camera. SISTER includes plotting software, and can also store simulations on disk for plotting with other software.

SITools2 is a CNES generic tool performed by a joint effort between CNES and scientific laboratories. SITools provides a self-manageable data access layer deployed on already existing scientific laboratory databases. This new version of SITools is a JAVA-based framework, under open source license, that provides a portable archive system, highly configurable, easy to use by laboratories, with a plugin mechanism so developers can add their own applications.

SIXTE simulates X-Ray telescope observation; the software performs instrument performance analyses and produces simulated event files for mission and analysis studies. SIXTE strives to find a compromise between exactness of the simulation and speed. Using calibration files such as the PSF, RMF and ARF makes efficient simulations possible at comparably high speed, even though they include nonlinear effects such as pileup. Setups for some current and future missions, such as XMM-Newton and Athena, are included in the package; others can be added by the user with relatively little effort through specifying the main instrument characteristics in a flexible, human-readable XML-based format. Properties of X-ray sources to be simulated are described in a detector-independent format, i.e., the same input can be used for simulating observations with all available instruments, and the same input can also be used for simulations with the SIMX simulator. The input files are easily generated from standard data such as XSPEC (ascl:9910.005) spectral models or FITS images with tools provided with the SIXTE distribution. The input data scale well from single point sources up to very complicated setups.

SKID finds gravitationally bound groups in N-body simulations. The SKID program will group different types of particles depending on the type of input binary file. This could be either dark matter particles, gas particles, star particles or gas and star particles depending on what is in the input tipsy binary file. Once groups with at least a certain minimum number of members have been determined, SKID will remove particles which are not bound to the group. SKID must use the original positions of all the particles to determine whether or not particles are bound. This procedure which we call unbinding, is again dependent on the type of grouping we are dealing with. There are two cases, one for dark matter only or star particles only (case 1 unbinding), the other for inputs including gas (also stars in a dark matter environment this is case 2 unbinding).

Skid version 1.3 is a much improved version of the old denmax-1.1 version. The new name was given to avoid confusion with the DENMAX program of Gelb & Bertschinger, and although it is based on the same idea it represents a substantial evolution in the method.

SKIRT is a radiative transfer code based on the Monte Carlo technique. The name SKIRT, acronym for Stellar Kinematics Including Radiative Transfer, reflects the original motivation for its creation: it has been developed to study the effects of dust absorption and scattering on the observed kinematics of dusty galaxies. In a second stage, the SKIRT code was extended with a module to self-consistently calculate the dust emission spectrum under the assumption of local thermal equilibrium. This LTE version of SKIRT has been used to model the dust extinction and emission of various types of galaxies, as well as circumstellar discs and clumpy tori around active galactic nuclei. A new, extended version of SKIRT code can perform efficient 3D radiative transfer calculations including a self-consistent calculation of the dust temperature distribution and the associated FIR/submm emission with a full incorporation of the emission of transiently heated grains and PAH molecules.

Written in Fortran 90, Sky3D solves the static or dynamic equations on a three-dimensional Cartesian mesh with isolated or periodic boundary conditions and no further symmetry assumptions. Pairing can be included in the BCS approximation for the static case. The code can be easily modified to include additional physics or special analysis of the results and requires LAPACK and FFTW3.

SkyCalc-iPy (SkyCalc for interactive Python) accesses atmospheric emission and transmission data generated by ESO’s SkyCalc tool interactively with Python. This package is based on the command line tool by ESO for accessing spectra on the ESO SkyCalc server.

SkyCat is a tool that combines visualization of images and access to catalogs and archive data for astronomy. The tool, developed in Tcl/Tk, was originally conceived as a demo of the capabilities of the class library that was developed for the VLT. The Skycat sources currently consist of five packages:

• Tclutil - Generic Tcl and C++ utilities
• Astrotcl - Astronomical Tcl and C++ utilities
• RTD - Real-time Display classes and widgets
• Catlib - Catalog library and widgets
• Skycat - Skycat application and library package

All of the required packages are always included in the tarfile.

Skycorr is an instrument-independent sky subtraction code that uses physically motivated line group scaling in the reference sky spectrum by a fitting approach for an improved sky line removal in the object spectrum. Possible wavelength shifts between both spectra are corrected by fitting Chebyshev polynomials and advanced rebinning without resolution decrease. For the correction, the optimized sky line spectrum and the automatically separated sky continuum (without scaling) is subtracted from the input object spectrum. Tests show that Skycorr performs well (per cent level residuals) for data in different wavelength regimes and of different resolution, even in the cases of relatively long time lags between the object and the reference sky spectrum. Lower quality results are mainly restricted to wavelengths not dominated by airglow lines or pseudo continua by unresolved strong emission bands.