AGILE: AGN In the LSST Era

AGILE is an end-to-end simulation pipeline designed to simulate truth catalogs as well as realistic LSST-like images, and photometric catalogs of AGNs, galaxies, and stars. AGILE is developed by INAF-OAR and in close collaboration with the Rubin-LSST AGN Science Collaboration.

A description of the AGILE software and its first data release are available at the AGILE webpage, while a more detailed and comprehensive treatment is presented in Viitanen et al. (2026). This documentation aims to cover the installation, usage, and how to contribute to the development.

The source code of AGILE is hosted in the INAF GitLab.

AGILE adheres to the software development guidelines for Rubin-LSST in-kind contributors as detailed in RDO-41:

Contact: Angela Bongiorno, Akke Viitanen

AGILE in a nutshell

AGILE is designed to allow for the characterization and investigation of the AGN population from Rubin-LSST optical/NIR photometric data, including variability. In its essence, AGILE is a forward model of an underlying truth catalog, and the LSST survey. The main features of AGILE are:

  1. Simulating an underlying truth catalog of AGNs, galaxies, and stars

  2. Simulating optical/near-IR variability of AGNs and stars

  3. Simulating synthetic LSST images

  4. Analyzing simulated LSST images

In addition, AGILE DR1 is the first production-scale simulation using the AGILE pipeline. It consists of a 24deg2 truth catalog centered around the COSMOS field, and simulated images and photometric catalogs of the central 1deg2 for up to three years of LSST operations.

Useful resources