Parametric Layers

[LouisDesdoigts]

I thought this would be a good place to discuss/track development of the different kind of parametric layers we want and live-track development.

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CompoundAperture()

Currently under-development. Currently functional but still a few q's to answer. Allows for an arbitrary number of soft-edged circular apertures/occulters to be combined.

Features:

• Differentiably parameterises circular apertures wrt both position and radius
• Creates a soft-edged aperture approximating a circle. The algorithm is fully function but needs some tweaking to fix very slightly incorrect aperture shapes. This is most likely inconsequential in 99% of cases and I may just merge it as-is and create a issue on the git.
• Allows for both Inner and outer apertures, ie primary mirrors + secondary obscurations.
• Allows creation of interferometers (with optimisible hole radii and positions :D)

Questions:

• Developing this has raised some questions about the best way to pass meta-data such as hole centers, radii and if its an aperture or occulter. As an idea, we could create a lightweight container class (Similar to wavefront) for aperture definitions to store this information. This could then be loaded into the OpticalSystem class and accessed by specific layers that need the data. It also provides an easier way to generate and store say the NIRISS AMI mask as an easy and portable manner. Perhaps we could even integrate this with the pysaif aperture class. This could make our life much easier in the long run in terms of supporting diverse and complex instrument model.

@benjaminpope would love your thoughts on this.

So ideally we would be able to integrate this same functionality for hexagonal apertures, but I suspect that the current algorithm will not work, at least not without some black-magic. I do have other ideas for how to do this though (over sampled latent masks, your fave Ben)

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