Hi yt folks, I’m happy to announce the first release of pyXSIM, the reincarnation of yt’s photon_simulator analysis module as a standalone package. pyXSIM is a Python package for simulating X-ray observations from astrophysical sources. X-rays probe the high-energy universe, from hot galaxy clusters to compact objects such as neutron stars and black holes and many interesting sources in between. pyXSIM makes it possible to generate synthetic X-ray observations of these sources from a wide variety of models, whether from grid-based simulation codes such as FLASH, Enzo, and Athena, to particle-based codes such as Gadget and AREPO, and even from datasets that have been created "by hand", such as from NumPy arrays. pyXSIM also provides facilities for manipulating the synthetic observations it produces in various ways, as well as ways to export the simulated X-ray events to other software packages to simulate the end products of specific X-ray observatories. Source repo lives here: http://github.com/jzuhone/pyxsim http://github.com/jzuhone/pyxsim Docs live here: http://hea-www.cfa.harvard.edu/~jzuhone/pyxsim http://hea-www.cfa.harvard.edu/~jzuhone/pyxsim Google group mailing list is here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pyxsim https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/pyxsim The photon_simulator analysis module within yt will no longer be updated, though it will remain within yt for the time being. I encourage all current users of photon_simulator to switch over to pyXSIM, as it will not only be the future track for this code but the version released today already contains many improvements over the version currently living in yt. Best, John ZuHone