From Particle to Pixels: Using numerical simulations to investigate observable galaxy kinematics

In this thesis, we present a comparison of galaxy kinematics as measured in observations and simulations. We investigate the reliability of kinematics within N-body simulations of isolated galaxies and develop an open-source software, SimSpin,
to observe them. The data produced has been used to explore how observing methods affect the recovered kinematics and to derive empirical formulae for correcting observations. Our corrections allow the evolutionary pathways of galaxies to be probed in the context of the kinematic-morphology density relation; and SimSpin presents a powerful strategy for making timely improvements to the sub-grid physics within cosmological simulations based on observations.