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.

The plan for the first week is to give you an overview of good things to know when it comes to scientific computing, give you time to do some hands-on exercises, and provide resources for you to learn more. We aim to cover basic unix commands and remote login (ssh), software version control (git and github), the Python programming language and scientific programming stack, and basic statistics and simulations. Given that we only have a week, we will only scratch the surface on each of these topics, but many of us will be around and willing (physically or via email/Slack) to provide support and additional guidance throughout the summer.

Before you start, please make sure that you have all requested access to the Adroit cluster following this link.

For live questions of general interest to the "camp masters" and to keep in touch with your fellow campers, please subscribe to the slack channels (details sent via email, or ask your camp master/mentor) .

Schedule of the Bootcamp

• Day 1 - unix commands, version control (github), ssh
• Day 2 - python and numpy
• Day 3 - statistical data analysis, linear fitting, and astropy
• Day 4 - 3 options: 1- more python basics, 2- advanced data analysis, 3- running hydro simulations

All sessions take place in person in Green Hall, room 1-C-4C, located on Washington Road near Nassau Street. The agenda for each days is detailed in the respective README files.

Colloquia and seminars

Seminars are held every Tuesday 12:30pm, colloquia every Thursday 12:30pm. The room is Fine Hall 214. Pizza will be delivered in Grand Central at 11:45am for a quick bite before heading to the seminar location shortly after 12pm.

Seminar schedule

1. June 07, 2022 - visualization (Peter Melchior)
2. June 14, 2022 - how to give a presentation (Sophie Reed)
3. June 21, 2022 - numerical techniques in astro: PIC method (Hayk Hakobyan)
4. June 28, 2022 - statistics (Peter Melchior)
5. July 06, 2022 - numerical techniques in astro: FV method (Jens Mahlmann) New date!
6. July 12, 2022 - how to talk about astrophysics to non-experts (Mike Lemonick)
7. July 19, 2022 - how to apply to grad school (Rodrigo Cordova and Jenny Greene)

Colloquium schedule

1. June 09, 2022 - supernovae remnants in the era of the James Webb space telescope (Tea Temim)
2. June 16, 2022 - computing the universe (Romain Teyssier)
3. June 23, 2022 - dynamical friction and the globular cluster timing problem (Shaunak Modak)
4. June 30, 2022 - neutron stars (Anatoly Spitkovsky)
5. July 07, 2022 - inward bound: understanding the Event Horizon Telescope results (Eliot Quataert)
6. July 14, 2022 - gravitational waves and colliding black holes (Michael Strauss)
7. July 20, 2022 - fast radio bursts (Jens Mahlmann) New date!

Games

1. June 07, 2022 - Outdoor game night with dinner at 5:00pm outside Peyton Hall
2. June 15, 2022 - Kayaking/canoeing on the canal
3. June 24, 2022 - Observing session at Peyton Hall with dinner @ 7:30 pm
4. June 27, 2022 - Practicing Inclusive Research & Advocating for Yourself, 107 Schultz Lab, 3-5pm
5. June 30, 2022 - Rock Climbing
6. July 13, 2022 - Escape Room, 11:30 departure from Goheen Walk

Lab visit schedule

1. June 08, 2022 - Visit of the Starshade Lab or "How to discover an exo-earth?"
2. June 13, 2022 - Meet science librarian Anya Bartelmann by Peyton doors 1pm and tour Lewis Science Library
3. June 22, 2022 - Visit of the Space Physics Lab on Wednesday from 12pm to 1pm

Final presentation

1. July 26th, 2022 - Practice talks
2. July 27th, 2022 - Practice talks
3. July 28th, 2022 - USRP finals

Links of Interest

• The Unix command line
• A Beginner's Guide to Working with Astronomical Data
• Python intro course notebooks
• Astronmy Workflow (with git and python)
• Understanding git conceptually
• Fitting a model to data