Hoopla

Hoopla is a simple javascript app for modeling images of strong gravitational lenses. It allows you to hand-craft a model lens out of elliptically-symmetric mass distributions (representing massive foreground galaxies) and elliptically symmetric light sources (representing faint background galaxies), and then dynamically predict the shape of the resulting gravitationally lensed image features as you tune the model. You can provide your own image to model, and you can save your tuned model's parameters to a shareable JSON file.

Give Hoopla a Try!

Model parameters for this example

Credits, License, Contact etc

Hoopla is based on the"LensWrangler" prototype made by Stuart Lowe, Amit Kapadia, Aprajita Verma and Phil Marshall, but with many interesting modifications added by Nan Li. The main function library is "eelens.js" in this repository, which is an updated version of lens.js. It includes elliptical models of both lenses and sources.

Hoopla is open source code, free for you to re-use under the MIT License in this repository (which means you can do anything you like with it but you can't blame us if it doesn't work). If you are interested in this project, please get in touch by [writing us an issue]() - we'd love to hear from you! Hoopla is scientific software, and research in progress: if you make use of any of the code or ideas in this repo in your own research, please cite us as "Li et al, in preparation" and provide a link to this repo's URL.