Kieran wants to study the initial mass function of an open cluster in the Large Magellanic Cloud. He plans to use the HAWK-I instrument on the VLT and would like to know what the faintest stars are that will be detectable (S/N > 5) with 1 hour of observing time in the K filter. He assumes average (50th percentile) observing conditions will apply for the observation
The goal of this exercise is to build a -very- simple exposure time calculator (ETC) module in Python for the HAWK-I imager instrument on the VLT. The only conditions for how to implement the ETC are:
- written in Python >=3.7
- the ETC function or class must be importable by other scripts (i.e. a function or class)
- a test suite is included in a separate file (e.g.
test_etc.py)
If you make any simplifying assumptions during the coding process, please document these in comments so that the reason for the assumption isn't lost to the sands of time.
The aim of this exercise is to demonstrate coding style, not to showcase radiometric talents. Therefore, it' is perfectly fine to make use of the radiometric-gymnastics package: How Many Photons
For comparing results, you may want to use the official ESO HAWK-I ETC.