how to simulate a spectrum

I had a great conversation today with Matt Daunt (NYU), building on discussion yesterday with also Megan Bedell (Flatiron), about how to simulate data from an extreme-precision radial-velocity spectrograph. We decided to simulate the star, the atmosphere, and the (gasp!) gas cell all at very high resolution, then combine them physically, then reduce resolution to the spectrograph resolution (which is very high nonetheless) and then sample and noisify the resulting data. The idea is: Make the structure of the code like the structure of our physical beliefs, or causal beliefs. We decided to fork this data simulation into its own project.