The steps explained in Sampling from a function do give an accurate representation of a profile prior to convolution. However, in an actual observation, the image is first convolved with or blurred by the atmospheric and instrument PSF in a continuous space and then it is sampled on the discrete pixels of the camera.
In order to more accurately simulate this process, the unconvolved image and the PSF are created on a finer pixel grid. In other words, the output image is a certain odd-integer multiple of the desired size, we can call this ‘oversampling’. The user can specify this multiple as a command-line option. The reason this has to be an odd number is that the PSF has to be centered on the center of its image. An image with an even number of pixels on each side does not have a central pixel.
The image can then be convolved with the PSF (which should also be oversampled on the same scale). Finally, image can be sub-sampled to get to the initial desired pixel size of the output image. After this, mock noise can be added as explained in the next section. This is because unlike the PSF, the noise occurs in each output pixel, not on a continuous space like all the prior steps.
GNU Astronomy Utilities 0.22 manual, February 2024.