AstroPaint: A Python Package for Painting Halo Catalogs into Celestial Maps

AstroPaint is a python package for generating and visualizing sky maps of a wide range of astrophysical signals originating from dark matter halos or the gas that they host. AstroPaint creates a whole-sky mock map of the target signal/observable, at a desired resolution, by combining an input halo catalog and the radial/angular profile of the astrophysical effect (see the workflow section for details). The package also provides a suite of tools that can facilitate analysis routines such as catalog filtering, map manipulation, and cutout stacking. The simulation suite has an Object-Oriented design and runs in parallel, making it both easy to use and readily scalable for production of high resolution maps with large underlying catalogs. Although the package has been primarily developed to simulate signals pertinent to galaxy clusters, its application extends to halos of arbitrary size or even point sources.