zingale / astro_animations

Various animations used for teaching introductory astronomy concepts

astro_animations

See http://zingale.github.io/astro_animations/

Various animations (and some figures) used for teaching introductory astronomy concepts.

Python codes are used to generate static images which are then animated as a movie. Both the movies and the python codes are present here.

Note: many of these animations were quickly put together before a lecture and don't necessarily use the more elegant coding or libraries. These will be refined during semesters when I am teaching introductory astronomy.

Many of the animations are also up on youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5D1C3702F5D1E571

anim_solvers: support routines for the animations (e.g. a class that understands a solar system and how to integrate the planet orbits

binary_exoplanets: various animations illustrating binary star orbits and concepts of exoplanets (radial velocities, transits).

CFD: some simple animations that show ideas in computational fluid dynamics.

ellipses: simple animations that illustrate the properties of ellipses.

galaxies: animations related to galaxies.

mechanics: animations showing the dynamics of orbits.

radiation_thermodynamics: simple animations showing blackbody curves and thermodynamics concepts.

radioactive_decay: an illustration of the random process of radioactive decay.

scripts: support scripts, including a simple wrapper for mencoder to string PNGs into a movie

solar_system_motion: lots of animations showing the basics of Kepler's laws, the Moon's orbit and phases, sidereal vs. synodic periods, ...

stars: figures related to stellar astrophysics.

waves: animations related to wave motion.

Setup

Many of the routines use the solver in anim_solvers to do the integration. This directory needs to be in your PYTHONPATH for the scripts to execute.

You will need to have numpy, matplotlib, and the python-basemap packages installed for the scripts to run.