Next: , Previous: , Up: Top   [Contents][Index]


2 Introduction

raygen generates rays from one or more user specified sources, filling one or more user specified entrance apertures. The output rays are in the bpipe format.

The source specification is done via scripts written in the lua language. raygen provides a basic set of angular generators (image, point, rect) which may be combined with spectrum generators to create fairly complicated sources. The use of an embedded scripting language to combine these generators provides a high degree of flexibility.

The area to be illuminated (i.e. the telescope’s entrance aperture) is constructed from a set of primitive geometric shapes (circles, annuli, annular wedges) which are combined via a script (again, written in lua).