Artificial star testing

[conornally]

I'm in the process of putting together a JWST specific PSF photometry pipeline and have reached artificial star testing. I notice that photutils contains all the underlying low-level code for artificial star testing but doesn't package it as a high-level module. Is there any work being done on this and or would this be a valuable pull request if I were to put a first draft together

[emirkmo]

I'm not a maintainer so I don't know, but this feature would be highly appreciated by users (like me).

[larrybradley]

There are a few new tools in photutils that can be used to create simulated images from (PSF) models, including:

• make_psf_model: https://photutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/photutils.psf.make_psf_model.html#photutils.psf.make_psf_model
• make_model_image: https://photutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/photutils.datasets.make_model_image.html#photutils.datasets.make_model_image
• make_model_param: https://photutils.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/photutils.datasets.make_model_params.html#photutils.datasets.make_model_params

These are used for internal testing and documentation. Here's an example notebook using make_psf_model: https://gist.github.com/larrybradley/b1e4112cf556e159a3c18e38e34a7fa1