Princeton Undergraduate Summer Research Program in Astrophysics

This repo contains information about the USRP at the Department of Astrophysical Sciences, foremost material for its first week course "Intro to Scientific Programming", aka bootcamp.

Before you start, please make sure that you have all necessary software installed on your personal machine. To help you along the way, have a look at these instructions.

General schedule of week 1

• 09:30-10:30 Course 1
• 10:30-11:00 Astro Coffee (Grand Central)
• 11:00-12:00 Course 2
• 12:00-13:00 Lunch
• 13:00-14:30 Discussion / Group exercise work
• 14:30-15:00 Break
• 15:00-17:00 Course 3 / Open time

All sessions take place in room 033 unless otherwise noted.

Tuesday (special schedule!)

• Installation help: 9–9:30 (Room 140)
• Breakfast and introductions: 9:30–10:30 (Grand central)
  • General introduction to department
  • Overview of full program
  • Introduce the plan for the day
• Astro coffee: 10:30-11:00 (Grand Central)
• Linux basics and start laptop setup: 11:00–12:00
• More laptop setup and linux: 13:30–14:00
• SSH and remote login to department machines: 14:00–15:00 (030)
• Git tutorial: 15:00–17:00

Wednesday

• Introduction to python: 9:30 - 10:30
• AstroCoffee: 10:30 - 11:00
• Introduction to numpy + broadcasting exercise : 11:00 - 12:30
• Lunch: 12:30 - 14:00
• Discussion: 14:00 - 14:30
• Break: 14:30 - 15:00
• Estimate pi: 15:00 - 17:00

Thursday

• Astropy
• Fitting a line to data
• Hubble expansion with linear algebra

Friday

• Introduction to Project + Topical Lessons: 9:30 - 10:30
• Project Work: 10:30 - 12:00
• Pizza Lunch: 12:00 - 13:00
• Introduction to Non-linear models: 13:00 - 14:00
• Project Work: 14:00 - 16:00
• Project Presentations & Wrap Up: 16:00 - 17:00
• Social Hour: 17:00 - 18:00

Colloquia and seminars

Colloquia usually are held every Thursday 12:30 in the Auditorium, seminars every Tuesday 12:30 in room 033. Pizza lunch on Tuesdays.

In addition we'll have an observing night on the roof of Peyton Hall on July 2 (with a backup on July 9 if necessary).

Seminar schedule

1. June 18 - Lunch with the graduate students
2. June 21 - SPECIAL (9am-noon): Scientist's Personal Toolkit (Melodie Kao)
3. June 25 - Visualization (Peter)
4. July 2 - Statistics (Andy)
5. July 9 - How to find and read papers (Remy)
6. July 16 - How to write a paper / Latex (Brandon)
7. July 23 - How to apply for a job (Rachael)
8. July 30 - How to give presentations (tbd)
9. Aug 6 - Practice talks (Andy + all)

Colloquium schedule

1. June 20 - Introduction to Gravitational Waves (Michael)
2. June 27 - Josh Winn
3. July 11 - Jenny Greene
4. July 18 - TBD
5. July 25 - Jo Dunkley
6. August 1 - TBD

Links of Interest

• A Beginner's Guide to Working with Astronomical Data
• Python intro course notebooks
• Understanding git conceptually
• Fitting a model to data