Instrument files

In order to set up a simulation for a particular X-ray instrument, additional files such as the Point Spread Function of the respective telescope or the detector response matrix are required. For most currently supported instruments these files are available in a separate. To use SIXTE for the Einstein Probe mission, you can use their web interface: http://epfxt.ihep.ac.cn/simulation.

For other missions, the calibration files have to be installed in the same directory as the instrument definition files contained in SIXTE, i.e., the directory sixtedir/share/ (where sixtedir denotes the location defined by the –prefix directive of configure).

You can find all available instrument files below.

Move the files to sixtedir and unpack them in the existing data tree. For the complete data archive the commands to achieve this are the following:

mv instruments_all-x.y.z.tar.gz $SIXTE/ 
cd $SIXTE 
tar xvzf instruments_srg-1.4.3.tar.gz

After these steps the simulation software is ready for use. For instance, an observation with eROSITA can be simulated by running the following tool:

$SIXTE/bin/erosim

Supplementary Files

Straylight events are from 3Ms long observations computed for the position alpha=2deg, delta=2deg in the revised catalogues of Marchesi et al., 2020. Source IDs in the FITS files correspond to the catalogues distributed here. Note that ra and dec in the FITS file is the backprojection of the x/y position onto the sky (computed as if the event was due to a “proper” source, and NOT the source position)

We provide two files, one appropriate for a staring observation with the WFI, and one observation appropropriate for an observation with a 3′ Lissajous dither pattern.