It is early 2010, I have just started my PhD in Astrophysics and I am trying to understand how to do things. Previously I was using mainly spreadsheets (either through Excel or Origin), but now I have to deal with different formats and approaches. Images, strange format that can hold …
Last year, In 2024 I took over the responsibility to teach a university course for the first time. Was it overwhelming? Without a doubt! Sure, I have been using python for almost 15 years, but condensing all that experience into a structured course … was definitely challenging. Fortunately, i had …
I have been using Python almost 15 years now! Starting from 2, over 3 and the many advances in the meantime (e.g. astropy!). So, this semester (Sprint 2024) i will be teaching the course “Introduction to Python for Physicists” (F-254) at the University of Crete. This will be an intro …
I have followed the pip install approach to add everything that I wanted for Python. Even though I did the same for jupyter when I was starting it (“jupyter notebook”) it would only start the Python 2 kernel, although Python 3 “was there” but not active actually. After some digging …
It is exciting to have a new machine, such the Lenovo Thinkpad X-1, but the process for setting it up can be a bit tedious. So this is a small guide what worked or didn’t through my small experience in installing Debian linux. [Just for the fun of it I …
Between 12 to 19 of September 2016, we organized the Ondřejov Summer School 2016, which was held at the Stellar Stellar Department of the Astronomical Institute (Czech Academy of Sciences), in Ondřejov. The main aim of the school was to provide students hands-on experience with real observational data, i.e. to …
Among the simplest installation methods to install IRAF are SciSoft (for RedHat/Fedora based distributions) and Fernando Avila Castro iso files (for Ubuntu/Debian based distributions). However, both require root privileges. What can you do when you do not have these permissions? Ureka [1] comes in rescue! It is easy to install …
How to make a dictionary of dictionaries with lists inside? For example we have a number of stellar spectral types (spec) and for each one of them we have a series of spectral lines (line) and their equivalent widths (ew). By creating a rather complex dictionary we can then call …
Although the are many information on how to use the genfromtxt (from numpy) there is not a clear demonstration (that I found…) to show how to easily read a text file with columns of data (including strings – it is straightforward to read columns of numbers with loadtxt for example). …
The easiest way to install any Python package is through PyPI. So, matplotlib is not an exception and we installed it on a CentOS (v6.4) machine without any errors (of course after updating numpy). But when we tried to plot something we couldn’t see anything. This is actually a backend …
