[AstroPy] Astropy demo presentations

[Aldcroft, Thomas]

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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