In our paper "Confronting Lemaitre-Tolman-Bondi models with Observational Cosmology" (arXiv:0802.1523) (or the PDF version with real transparency here) we propose a cosmological model where the current acceleration of the observational universe is explained not by the prevailing model of Dark energy, but simply because we are living in a special place in the universe close to the centre of a big void.

Then acceleration is only apparent and due to spatial changes in the curvature, not to Dark Energy. Initially we were sceptical of similar models, that have been promoted by quite a few authors recently, so to test the model against a reasonable body of observations we developed a Fortran 90 program that integrates light rays from the centre and outwards in any open LTB model, and compare the resulting distance-redshift relations, and the resulting size of the sound horizon to the ones we observe thorugh Supernovae, BAO and the first acoustic peak in the CMB.

Our program can be downloaded here and includes some IDL routines to read the data, and produce marginalised likelihood plots, like the one to the right. It is modularised, and documented, so to check your very own LTB model against observations is a question of copying three files, and rewrite four subroutines with your own functions H(r) and Omega(r), and their derivatives.

We kindly ask you to reference the paper when using the routines for research, and remind you that any research based on this code has to be published in an open access format - i.e. on arXiv or another public and permanent web site.

With our second paper Looking the void in the eyes - the kSZ effect in LTB models about how to use the kinetic Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect to constrain observationally the possible LTB models, we have released a new version of the code that can be used for computing the expected kSZ signal for a given model. It can be found here.

With the latest paper The radial BAO scale and Cosmic Shear, a new observable for Inhomogeneous Cosmologies we have updated the code, and integrated new data sets into the code: We have included the UNION data set of Type Ia Supernovae, and the radial BAO detected in the DR6 LRG galaxies by Gaztanaga et al. The updated code can be found here.