[AstroPy] Astropy demo presentations

[Aldcroft, Thomas]

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 10:59 AM, Adam Ginsburg
<adam.g.ginsburg at gmail.com> wrote:
> If you're going to demo astroquery, though, note that it will only
> work with astropy >=0.3, i.e. it requires the dev version of astropy
> right now.  astroquery relies on astropy.coordinates, which changed
> API between 0.2.x and 0.3.
>
> Following Tom Aldcroft's suggestions seems reasonable, but for the
> next month or two that probably means astroquery has to be left out.

Of course if astroquery is what you really want to highlight based on
your audience, then you should probably just do that part of the demo
with astropy dev + astroquery, with a caveat up front that this
functionality is "coming soon" to astropy stable.

- Tom

>
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 5:58 AM, Aldcroft, Thomas
> <aldcroft at head.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Leo Singer <lsinger at caltech.edu> wrote:
>>> On Aug 8, 2013, at 10:00 AM, astropy-request at scipy.org wrote:
>>>
>>> From: Erik Bray <embray at stsci.edu>
>>> Subject: Re: [AstroPy] Astropy demo presentations.
>>> Date: August 8, 2013 8:50:10 AM PDT
>>> To: <astropy at scipy.org>
>>>
>>>
>>> On 08/07/2013 12:56 PM, Demitri Muna wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Aug 7, 2013, at 12:28 PM, Leo Singer <lsinger at caltech.edu
>>> <mailto:lsinger at caltech.edu>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Next week, I am supposed to give a tutorial on Astropy during a 'bootcamp'
>>> session of the iPTF workshop
>>> (http://ptf.caltech.edu/iptf/iptf_workshop/srk_agenda.html). I am
>>> interpreting
>>> this as an introduction to Python itself as well. I have half an hour, but I
>>> am asking the organizers to extend that to a full hour. Are there any
>>> tutorial
>>> resources on Astropy that I should know about? My idea was to put together a
>>> presentation as an IPython Notebook and go through a few different common
>>> data
>>> analysis tasks.
>>>
>>>
>>> This raises a request I was going to bring up. For each major release, can
>>> we
>>> (as a group) put together an Astropy demonstration for each major release?
>>> This
>>> way when there is a new release, people at any institution would have
>>> something
>>> to demo for their department, e.g. at their morning coffee. I think many
>>> more
>>> people will give such a presentation if it exists versus sitting down to
>>> write
>>> one and give it. I'd recommend a five minute version and a half-hour
>>> version.
>>> These should be available coincident with the releases, and highlight the
>>> major
>>> functionality of Astropy. If one has to choose between a full introduction
>>> and a
>>> "what is new since the last release", I'd opt for the former, but both would
>>> be
>>> ideal.
>>>
>>>
>>> Each new feature release already includes the latter:
>>> http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/whatsnew/0.2.html
>>>
>>> Though I could see a cumulative guide that's kept up to date (and that
>>> incorporates examples from the "what's new" page) being useful too.
>>>
>>>
>>> I'm a little torn on which version of Astropy I should use for this
>>> workshop. Personally, I always use the bleeding edge from Git. Is it a very
>>> bad idea to teach from Git rather than from the stable release?
>>>
>>> FYI, some of the tasks in the tutorial will include Astroquery and
>>> Photutils.
>>
>> In general I would advise against giving demos using the dev version.
>> Especially for people that may be new to Python, this adds another
>> layer of complexity / confusion and makes the whole installation issue
>> even harder.  In our tutorials we have had people just install
>> Anaconda, which takes 5-10 minutes and already includes the stable
>> astropy.  There is plenty to demonstrate in astropy stable for an
>> hour.
>>
>> As a side note, one thing we've run into with installing Anaconda at a
>> workshop is wireless bandwidth problems when you have 20 people trying
>> to download a 200 Mb file.  Thumb drives are a good solution.
>>
>> - Tom
>>
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Leo
>>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Adam Ginsburg
> Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy
> University of Colorado at Boulder
> http://www.adamgginsburg.com/