Gyoto

General relativitY Orbit Tracer of Observatoire de Paris

Downloading and installing | User manual | Conditions for use

Gyoto aims at providing a framework for computing orbits and ray-traced images in General relativity. It consists of a library (libgyoto), utility programs, a plug-in for the Yorick programing language, and an extension for the Python 3 programing language. Gyoto is known to run under Linux and Mac OS X. Please do tell us if you manage to run Gyoto under a different OS. It should compile and run with moderate effort on most UNIX-like systems.

Gyoto can be expanded with plug-ins providing custom Gyoto::Metric::Generic, Gyoto::Astrobj::Generic and Gyoto::Spectrum::Generic classes, which describe respectively analytical or numerical metrics, astronomical objects, and spectral shapes for astronomical objects (see Writing plug-ins for Gyoto). Custom Gyoto::Metric::Generic, Gyoto::Astrobj::Generic and Gyoto::Spectrum::Generic classes can also be written in the Python 3.x interpreted language using the `python` plug-in for Gyoto, see below. Beware that a Python implementation of a custom class will run significantly slower than the equivalent C++ implementation, but sometimes saving on development time is better than saving on computing time.

The base distribution includes three plug-ins: the standard plug-in (`stdplug`), a plug-in for using LORENE-based numerical metrics (`lorene`) and a plug-in for writing custom astronomical objects or metrics in the Python 3.x interpreted language (`python`).

A graphical user interface for tracing stellar orbits is provided with the Yorick plug-in (see Gyoto for Yorick).

To visit the code Picture Gallery: click here!

# Downloading and installing

Detailed information on installing Gyoto is available here. The user manual below is also a valuable read.

# User manual

The user manual is available here.

# Conditions for use

We request that use of Gyoto in scientific publications be properly acknowledged. Please cite:

F. H. Vincent, T. Paumard, E. Gourgoulhon & G. Perrin: GYOTO: a new general relativistic ray-tracing code, Classical and Quantum Gravity 28, 225011 (2011) [published version] [preprint: arXiv:1109.4769]

We also request that Gyoto modifications, extensions or plug-ins leading to a scientific publication be made public as free software reasonably fast (within one year after publication of the scientific paper), for instance by contributing it directly to the Gyoto code base. Contributors will be listed in the relevant source files as well as in the AUTHORS file in the package.

Gyoto is Copyright 2011-2016 Thibaut Paumard, Frédéric Vincent and Odele Straub.

Gyoto is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.