Known limitations
These are the open physics items a user should know about before trusting a number. Each links to the GitHub issue that tracks it.
The PSF is an Airy pattern for the full 3 m pupil. The encircled energy of the photometric aperture and the automatic peak-pixel fraction do not include the Lyot stop, which widens the PSF, or pointing jitter. Both lower the encircled energy, so integration times are optimistic. Whether the focal-plane mask throughput table is a total or an in-core throughput is also still open. #30
The raw contrast is one number. It does not vary with separation, wavelength or bandwidth, no inner or outer working angle is enforced, and the off-axis throughput is read from the table with the nearest point rather than interpolated. #32
Saturation only considers the planet’s aperture. The brightest pixel on the detector is near the mask edge or in the leaked stellar core, where the contrast is far worse than in the dark hole. For a bright host the detector-safe frame time is much shorter than
saturation_time(). #33Nothing has been checked against measured data. The detector parameters are digitized from the manufacturer’s plots, and the vortex throughput curve comes from the literature. Cross-checks against measured detector, vortex and on-sky data are tracked in #34.