Purpose: Estimate the zodiacal light at Spitzer bands at any time during the mission.

Author: W. Reach, J. Bennett, & B. Hartley (SSC)
Date Contributed 3 Feb 2012
System Requirements: C

Information and Download

Download the source code. The README contains all of the information required to run the code.

As part of Spot, the Spitzer tool for planning observations, there was included a model of the zodiacal light. It included an estimate at Spitzer bands for the zodiacal light for any time during the mission, as a function of the spacecraft's position. This model was developed by Bill Reach and originally coded by Judy Bennett, and updated by Booth Hartley. An estimate from this algorithm (appropriate for the position and time of observation) is included in each of the FITS headers of Spitzer data. This tool can be relatively easily adapted for use with other spacecraft. The 661MB tarball includes several large files that it needs for estimating Spitzer's position, including a cspice.a file (c library) appropriate for a Linux system. For other machine architecture, a new cspice.a file is required to be downloaded from the NAIF website. For other spacecraft or ground observations, the appropriate ephemeris files must be obtained. This is all discussed in the README file inside the tar file.