Small maps of the Rees-Sciama ( RS ) effect are simulated by using an appropriate N-body code and a certain ray-tracing procedure .
A method designed for the statistical analysis of cosmic microwave background ( CMB ) maps is applied to study the resulting simulations .
These techniques , recently proposed –by our team– to consider lens deformations of the CMB , are adapted to deal with the RS effect .
This effect and the deviations from Gaussianity associated to it seem to be too small to be detected in the near future .
This conclusion follows from our estimation of both the RS angular power spectrum and the RS reduced n -direction correlation functions for n \leq 6 .