Homework 2014 Belfast
Introduce yourself
Prepare a class handout
I will create a handout giving names, a small photo, and research interests of all participants. This will allow us to get to know one another more quickly. Please send a small passport-style photo (mainly the face), your affiliation, and a brief statement of research interests, to the class discussion board. The current version of the document is on line here. Deadline Monday Aug 11.
Prepare a 4-minute introductory talk
We will all give 4-minute introductory presentations on our research interests and background. Please prepare a one-page landscape format PDF of your talk and post it to the discussion board. This will be available on the projector when you give your talk. We will break up into teams to work on research projects and this introduction will help identify participants with similar interests. Deadline Monday Aug 11.
AGN3
You will need a copy of Osterbrock & Ferland 2006. We will use this extensively.
Cloudy
BYOD & be able to compute models during the workshop
We want to spend our time thinking about the astronomy rather than the computer science. You need to have a working copy of Cloudy to participate. You should be able to create an input deck, run Cloudy, and make plots of the predictions during the workshop.
Best would be to bring a laptop to do the simulations locally. The classroom will have wifi so you can log into your home computer to do the simulations there.
There are small Windows machines located in the room but only QUB students can log into them. If you cannot bring your own device you might try to create a bootable copy of your favorite operating system on a USB drive. The boot order of the machines is not locked, so you can set them to boot off the USB drive, often by pressing F12 during bootup. (I would be fairly surprised if this worked without problems).
Download and install our preview version of Cloudy
We will use a special preview version of Cloudy in this workshop. It is available from the class ftp site
Unpack the tarball following the instructions for downloading and installing Cloudy that are here, but using the copy you obtained here.
Problems?? Search our Yahoo group to see if others have solved it, and post a question if you don't find help.
You should make it through at least step 5 of the instructions this site. When finished you will have an executable that can successfully pass its smoke test. You should have a script "run" that will read input from "name.in" and produce the "name.out" output file.
This ftp site will be used to save copies of files used during class. You should bookmark it so you can get back to it easily.
A note on Macs: You need to install a working compiler to build Cloudy on a Mac. The LLVM 3.4 compiler included in XCODE 5.1 has bugs and cannot build the code. See the workaround here.
Have access to the code's documentation
These are PDF files located in the Workshop14/docs directory in the download or here. You should read the Cloudy Quick Start before the workshop. You should be able to view Hazy1.pdf and Hazy2.pdf, the documentation files, on your laptop. Please don't print them.
Typos?? If you notice any please let me know by posting to the Yahoo group.
Run the "hii_paris.in" input script and plot the results
You will find this test in the subdirectory Workshop14/tsuite/auto. Several files will be created when you compute the model. The most important is the main output, named "hii_paris.out" if you use our recommended "run" script. Look at the last lines in that file. They should say "Cloudy exited OK". If they don't you have problems and should investigate.
We will make lots of plots showing predicted quantities during the workshop. You will need to compute models and create plots while in the class. Gnuplot is popular among people who like its command line interface. I use Jeremy Sanders' Veusz program, which is GUI based and very Cloudy friendly. The appendix of the Quick Start Guide explains how we use Veusz.
The file "hii_paris.ovr" is the "overview" file that was created when you ran Cloudy. It has lots of information about the physical conditions in the cloud. The first row gives column headers. The remaining rows give properties of the cloud at each depth point. They are tab delimited fields meaning that a tab character separates columns.
Make a plot in which the depth into the cloud is the x-axis and the gas the kinetic temperature is the y-axis. The depth in cm is the first column in the overview file. The temperature is the second. Save a copy of the plot in PDF format. Forward the plot as an email to the Yahoo Workshop group. Deadline Sunday August 17.
Read the Cloudy Quick Start Guide
This is a short introduction to all of Cloudy. Read it to get an overview of what we will be discussing. It is in the docs directory of the downloaded copy of Cloudy and a version is available by ftp here.