The FluxCompensator: Making Radiative Transfer Models of hydrodynamical
  Simulations Directly Comparable to Real Observations
  When modeling astronomical objects throughout the universe, it is important
to correctly treat the limitations of the data, for instance finite resolution
and sensitivity. In order to simulate these effects, and to make radiative
transfer models directly comparable to real observations, we have developed an
open-source Python package called the FluxCompensator that enables the
post-processing of the output of 3-d Monte-Carlo radiative transfer codes, such
as HYPERION. With the FluxCompensator, realistic synthetic observations can be
generated by modelling the effects of convolution with arbitrary point-spread
functions (PSFs), transmission curves, finite pixel resolution, noise and
reddening. Pipelines can be applied to compute synthetic observations that
simulate observatories, such as the Spitzer Space Telescope or the Herschel
Space Observatory. Additionally, this tool can read in existing observations
(e.g. FITS format) and use the same settings for the synthetic observations. In
this paper, we describe the package as well as present examples of such
synthetic observations.
