Homework 2015 Belfast

Introduce yourself

Prepare a class handout

I am creating 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 your 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 Wednesday Jan 7.

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 computer 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 Friday Jan 9.

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.

It would be best to bring a laptop to do the simulations and plots locally. This is the best way to participate.

The classroom will have wifi so may be possible to 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. Download the file CloudyBelfast15.tar.gz that is available at the workshop ftp site.

Unpack the tarball following the instructions for downloading and installing Cloudy that are here, but using the copy you just obtained.

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 (run the code with the input having the single command "test").

You should have a script "run" that will read input from "name.in" and produce the "name.out" output file.

The workshop 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.

Have access to the code's documentation

These are PDF files are located directory where you downloaded Cloudy. You should read the Cloudy Quick Start Guide before the workshop. You should be able to view Hazy1 and Hazy2, 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 15Belfast/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 January 11.

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 available by ftp here.