1.1 Purpose and audience
The simulator answers a question every astrophotographer faces when planning gear: given two complete setups and a target, which one will produce the better image, and by how much? Real-world answers require nights of acquisition, processing, and side-by-side comparison — impractical for screening dozens of configurations. The simulator collapses that experiment to seconds by modeling the entire imaging chain end-to-end and rendering both results next to each other in a single page.
It is aimed at intermediate and advanced amateur astrophotographers comparing telescope/sensor combinations, evaluating filter choices, optimizing acquisition strategies (sub length, total integration time, cooling temperature, guiding quality), or understanding how site quality (seeing, sky darkness) shifts the balance between two setups. It is not a replacement for real imaging — the procedural targets are synthetic — but it isolates and quantifies the technical factors that drive image quality.
1.2 The dual-system concept
The page is built around two columns labeled System A and System B. Each column is an independent, fully configurable imaging stack: telescope (aperture, focal length, obstruction), camera (sensor model from a catalog of ~20 modern CMOS), filter (UV/IR cut, duoband, NB-7nm narrowband), site conditions (Bortle / SQM, seeing, ambient temperature), guiding RMS, and acquisition (sub length, sub count, binning, drizzle).
Every downstream computation — signal, noise, PSF, sampling, SNR, MTF, rendered image, optimal sub length — is computed independently for A and B and displayed side by side. The visual comparison is the core deliverable.
Last version as of post
https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/3fb86e1e-cea2-4759-be34-6b66696772d7
Topic were I keep posting new releases
