Lensed

A scientific tool to reconstruct lenses and sources from observations of strong gravitational lensing.

What is Lensed?

Lensed is a scientific tool to reconstruct gravitational lensing systems from observations of strong lensing (like the one at the top of this page). Armed with a FITS file from a telescope, and a configuration file containing a model for the observation, it allows you to explore the parameter space of the model in a Bayesian fashion. Lensed runs on GPU and CPU devices for maximal speed and efficiency in the computations.

How does it work?

Using your provided model, Lensed will render the expected image of the lensing event for a large number of parameter settings, thereby exploring the space of possible realisations of the observation. It compares the expectation to the observed image by calculating the likelihood that the observation was indeed produced by the assumed model, thus reconstructing the probability distribution over the parameter space of the model.

For more information, please refer to our scientific paper on Lensed.

Get Lensed

The quickest way to try out Lensed is by downloading one of our prepared release versions.

Make sure to read the documentation. It contains information on how to get started, and instructions on how to get the latest development version of the code and build Lensed from source.

Find out more

To get started, please read the documentation. It contains information on setting up Lensed, , tips on how to get started with reconstructions, and the definition of objects for lenses and sources.

Take me to the source

Check out the GitHub project for Lensed’s source code, issue tracker, and pull requests.

Your contribution is welcome!

Lensed is meant to be a community project. Your help is welcome, be it the reporting and fixing of bugs, asking for or providing clarification of the documentation, extending Lensed with new objects for lenses or sources, or simply providing your impressions and feedback regarding the code. Please head over to the GitHub project to get involved.

Citing Lensed

The published article and the preprint on Lensed are available online. There is also an ADS entry.

For citing Lensed, please use the BibTeX entry as prepared by ADS:

@ARTICLE{2016MNRAS.463.3115T,
   author = {{Tessore}, N. and {Bellagamba}, F. and {Metcalf}, R.~B.},
    title = "{LENSED: a code for the forward reconstruction of lenses and sources from strong lensing observations}",
  journal = {\mnras},
archivePrefix = "arXiv",
   eprint = {1505.07674},
 keywords = {gravitational lensing: strong, methods: data analysis, methods: numerical, methods: statistical, techniques: image processing},
     year = 2016,
    month = dec,
   volume = 463,
    pages = {3115-3128},
      doi = {10.1093/mnras/stw2212},
   adsurl = {http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016MNRAS.463.3115T},
  adsnote = {Provided by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System}
}

Lensed is listed in the Astrophysics Source Code Library as ascl:1505.026.