Background Modeling Software: nuskybgd
The NuSTAR telescope has an open optical path between its mirrors and detectors, allowing unreflected X-rays to shine directly on the focal plane, producing an additional background with a spatial gradient. This feature makes the standard procedure for dealing with the background -- characterizing the background in a blank location within the field of view -- incorrect. The nuskybgd code allows the user to model its contribution to the background along with that from instrumental, focused cosmic, and sunlight-induced background components. It can be retrieved from github in either the original, now unmaintained IDL version, or in its now official python version. A description of how it works can be found in this paper, which you should cite if you make use of either version of the code.
NuSTAR Reduction Cookbook
I've created a set of IDL routines that automate the basic reduction and background characterization (using the IDL version of nuskybgd) as much as possible. These can be found on my personal github repo here.
Spatial-Spectral Fitting: nucrossarf
Originally conceived to treat NuSTAR data as a three dimensional datacube (x,y,E) to be simultaneously fit spatially and spectrally, in practice the method is too computational intensive. The software exists in two forms, adapted to specific datasets, and focuses on performing either simultaneous spectral fits in multiple adjacent regions or spatial fits in several energy bands simultaneously. Theese approaches are necessitated by NuSTAR's broad point spread function. The former version, which creates "cross-ARFs" to account for PSF bleed between spectral extraction regions, is available as the IDL software nucrossarf. The latter version has not yet been made publicly available, but it has been employed in published work on the analysis of XRBs in nearby galaxies.
Other Analysis Code
Largely centered around the spatial analysis of diffuse emission, I have various other bits of code, mostly written for Chandra and/or XMM-Newton data. Hope to clean it up one day and make public, but not this day.
