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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.
pyBLoCXS is a sophisticated Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based algorithm designed to carry out Bayesian Low-Count X-ray Spectral (BLoCXS) analysis in the Sherpa environment. The code is a Python extension to Sherpa that explores parameter space at a suspected minimum using a predefined Sherpa model to high-energy X-ray spectral data. pyBLoCXS includes a flexible definition of priors and allows for variations in the calibration information. It can be used to compute posterior predictive p-values for the likelihood ratio test. The pyBLoCXS code has been tested with a number of simple single-component spectral models; it should be used with great care in more complex settings.
LIRA (Low-counts Image Reconstruction and Analysis) deconvolves any unknown sky components, provides a fully Poisson 'goodness-of-fit' for any best-fit model, and quantifies uncertainties on the existence and shape of unknown sky. It does this without resorting to χ2 or rebinning, which can lose high-resolution information. It is written in R and requires the FITSio package.