Sept 12-16, 2016
9:00 am - 5:00 pm
Instructors: Stuart Mumford, Andrew Leonard
OpenAstronomy is a collaboration between many astronomy focused open source projects. Workshops run by OpenAstronomy use the excellent Software Carpentry curriculum for the first two days, which is designed to help scientists and engineers get more research done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic lab skills for scientific computing. The rest of the workshop is more astronomy and solar physics focused, covering tools specific to doing research in these fields.
For more information on what we teach and why, please see Software Carpentry's paper "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".
Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop. In the first two days we will cover the all the tools required in modern scientific research. The thrid day will be a shorter day with discussions on open source science and contributing to software packges. The second two days will be focused on handling astrophysical data sets in Python. The focus will be on SunPy and Astropy, however the skills learnt here are extremely transferable.
Where: Lecture Theatre B, Hicks Building, Housfield Rd, S3 7RH, Yorkshire. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a few specific software packages installed (listed below). They are also required to abide by Software Carpentry's Code of Conduct.
Contact: Please mail s.mumford@sheffield.ac.uk for more information.
Register: If you are intetested in attending please fill in this form.
09:00 | Introduction and software checking / fixing |
09:30 | Automating tasks with the Unix shell |
10:50 | Coffee |
11:10 | Further Unix |
12:30 | Lunch break |
13:30 | Version Control with Git |
14:50 | Coffee |
15:10 | Further Git |
16:30 | Wrap-up |
09:30 | Building programs with Python |
10:50 | Coffee |
11:10 | Conitinuing programs with Python |
12:30 | Lunch break |
13:30 | Further Python |
14:50 | Coffee |
15:10 | Even Further Python |
16:00 | Wrap-up |
10:00 | Approximating pi |
11:30 | Open Source in Astronomy |
09:30 | Units and Quantities |
10:50 | Tea and Coffee |
11:10 | Images and Plotting |
12:30 | Lunch |
13:30 | Images in Astronomy |
14:50 | Tea and Coffee |
15:10 | Images in Astronomy 2 |
16:30 | Wrap |
09:30 | AstroPy Tables |
10:50 | Tea and Coffee |
11:10 | Obtaining Solar and Astronomical data |
12:45 | Lunch |
14:00 | Introduction to Time Series |
16:00 | Wrap |
Etherpad: https://public.etherpad-mozilla.org/p/Sheffield_Python_SunPy.
We will use this Etherpad for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
add
, commit
, ...status
, diff
, ...clone
, pull
, push
, ...To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
Bash is a commonly-used shell that gives you the power to do simple tasks more quickly.
This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program.
The default shell in all versions of Mac OS X is Bash, so no
need to install anything. You access Bash from the Terminal
(found in
/Applications/Utilities
). You may want to keep
Terminal in your dock for this workshop.
The default shell is usually Bash, but if your
machine is set up differently you can run it by opening a
terminal and typing bash
. There is no need to
install anything.
Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what when and has options for easily updating a shared or public version of your code on github.com. You will need a supported web browser (current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or Internet Explorer version 9 or above).
Git should be installed on your computer as part of your Bash install (described above).
For OS X 10.9 and higher, install Git for Mac
by downloading and running the most recent "mavericks" installer from
this list.
After installing Git, there will not be anything in your /Applications
folder,
as Git is a command line program.
For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.8) use the
most recent available installer labelled "snow-leopard"
available here.
If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to
install it via your distro's package manager. For Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install git
and for Fedora run
sudo yum install git
.
When you're writing code, it's nice to have a text editor that is
optimized for writing code, with features like automatic
color-coding of key words. The default text editor on Mac OS X and
Linux is usually set to Vim, which is not famous for being
intuitive. if you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, try
typing the escape key, followed by :q!
(colon, lower-case 'q',
exclamation mark), then hitting Return to return to the shell.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. To install it, download the Software Carpentry Windows installer and double click on the file to run it. This installer requires an active internet connection.
Others editors that you can use are Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Be aware that you must add its installation directory to your system path. Please ask your instructor to help you do this.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. It should be pre-installed.
Others editors that you can use are Text Wrangler or Sublime Text.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. It should be pre-installed.
Others editors that you can use are Gedit, Kate or Sublime Text.
Python is a popular language for scientific computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well. Installing all of its scientific packages individually can be a bit difficult, so we recommend Anaconda, an all-in-one installer.
We will teach Python using the IPython notebook, a programming environment that runs in a web browser. For this to work you will need a reasonably up-to-date browser. The current versions of the Chrome, Safari and Firefox browsers are all supported (some older browsers, including Internet Explorer version 9 and below, are not).
bash Anaconda-and then press tab. The name of the file you just downloaded should appear.
yes
and
press enter to approve the license. Press enter to approve the
default location for the files. Type yes
and
press enter to prepend Anaconda to your PATH
(this makes the Anaconda distribution the default Python).
Given that you have installed python using anaconda, we can use the anaconda environment to install SunPy too.
conda config --add channels conda-forge --add channels astropy
conda install sunpy astroquery
Once you are done installing the software listed above, please go to this page, which has instructions on how to test that everything was installed correctly.