CAMELOT facilitates the comparison of observational data and simulations of molecular clouds and/or star-forming regions. The central component of CAMELOT is a database summarizing the properties of observational data and simulations in the literature through pertinent metadata. The core functionality allows users to upload metadata, search and visualize the contents of the database to find and match observations/simulations over any range of parameter space.

To bridge the fundamental disconnect between inherently 2D observational data and 3D simulations, the code uses key physical properties that, in principle, are straightforward for both observers and simulators to measure — the surface density (Sigma), velocity dispersion (sigma) and radius (R). By determining these in a self-consistent way for all entries in the database, it should be possible to make robust comparisons.

MADCUBA analyzes astronomical datacubes and multiple spectra from various astronomical facilities, including ALMA, Herschel, VLA, IRAM 30m, APEX, GBT, and others. These telescopes, and in particular ALMA, generate extremely large datacubes (spatial, spectral and polarization). This software combines a user-friendly interface and powerful data analysis system to derive the physical conditions of molecular gas, its chemical complexity and the kinematics from datacubes. Built using the ImageJ (ascl:1206.013) infrastructure, MADCUBA visualizes astronomical datacubes with thousands on spectral channels, and datasets with thousands of spectra; it also identifies molecular species using publicly available molecular catalogs. It can automatically derive the physical parameters of the molecular species: column density, excitation temperature, velocity and linewidths and provides the best non-linear least-squared fit using the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm, among other tasks.