[Mesa-users] Grad stellar structure & evolution course

[Evan Bauer]

Hi All,

It sounds to me like a lot of what we’re looking for is more of a python version of Bill Wolf’s ruby interface MesaScript (https://github.com/wmwolf/MesaScript <https://github.com/wmwolf/MesaScript>). Once you have an interface like that for editing inlists and an ability to call subprocesses to run the star executable, most of the power of MESA is available to you. Bundle that into a docker container that’s already setup to run MESA, and it should be pretty easy to set up a purely jupyter interface for students.

I’ve used Rob’s pyMesa for making direct EOS calls. It’s an awesome tool for making direct calls to individual modules, but I don’t think it’s the right tool for students to run MESA. Since you’re ultimately making calls to the public fortran routines from a module, parts of it necessarily feel rather unpythonic, and would probably be confusing for students.

Cheers,
Evan


> On Oct 6, 2017, at 9:37 AM, Rob Farmer <r.j.farmer at uva.nl> wrote:
> 
> Hi
> 
> pyMesa is a little too low level I think for this for now and it can't run a full star, yet.  Just running Mesa in python is trivial with pythons subprocess command (which just runs things in a shell). The tricky bit is making a nice interface for editing inlists. The plotting side we already have several python packages that could be gui-ified or integrated into a notebook.
> 
> Rob
> 
> 
> On 6 Oct 2017 18:12, "Bill Paxton" <paxton at kitp.ucsb.edu <mailto:paxton at kitp.ucsb.edu>> wrote:
> Hi Sean,
> 
> Good to hear from you.  And thanks for the suggestions.  Something along those lines sounds both doable and useful.  
> 
> Rob Farmer has made a great start of adding Python interfaces to some of the MESA physics modules such as eos, rates, neu, atm, and kap.   Perhaps his pyMESA can evolve to do the things you mention (https://github.com/rjfarmer/pyMesa <https://github.com/rjfarmer/pyMesa>).  Or perhaps it will be simpler to make a fresh start just aimed at the ease of use of mesa stellar evolution with emphasis on students new to programming/computation.  It is definitely something I’ll look into.
> 
> Would love to hear from other mesa-users on this topic.
> 
> Cheers,
> Bill
> 
> 
>> On Oct 6, 2017, at 8:32 AM, Sean M. Couch <couch at pa.msu.edu <mailto:couch at pa.msu.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> I think the top of my wishlist, particularly for using MESA as a teaching tool, would be a Python/Jupyter notebook interface. We use a lot of Jupyter notebooks and Python in our instruction and it is very approachable for students new to programming/computation. An interface to MESA could provide utilities for changing inlists, running a pre-compiled MESA binary, and automagically plotting output in the notebook.
>> 
>> Sean
>> 
>> 
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> Sean M. Couch
>> Assistant Professor
>> Department of Physics and Astronomy
>> Department of Computational Mathematics, Science, and Engineering
>> National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory/Facility for Rare Isotope Beams
>> Michigan State University
>> 567 Wilson Rd <https://maps.google.com/?q=567+Wilson+Rd&entry=gmail&source=g>, 3250 BPS
>> East Lansing, MI  48824
>> (517) 884-5035    ——    couch at pa.msu.edu <mailto:couch at pa.msu.edu>    ——    www.pa.msu.edu/~couch <http://www.pa.msu.edu/~couch>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On October 5, 2017 at 5:29:35 PM, Bill Paxton (paxton at kitp.ucsb.edu <mailto:paxton at kitp.ucsb.edu>) wrote:
>> 
>>> It would be valuable to get some feedback from folks who have used mesa in courses about what might be done to make that easier and more valuable. In particular, what would stop you from using it in a course for students without programming experience? There’s a lot that can be done with mesa just by editing inlists and never looking at a line of code, let alone writing any. 
>>> 
>>> Is the command line interface a barrier to non-programming students? I imagine many of them have never used a command line interface! Would it help to have a simple GUI that replaced the terminal by a more familiar interface of buttons and text fields? 
>>> 
>>> Or is the initial installation and compilation a show stopper for students without programming background? What would be a useful workaround for that? 
>>> 
>>> What else? It’s time to generate a wish list. Feel free to endorse the worthy project of a new mesa-based textbook, but some of the current blocks to using mesa in the classroom might be solved more quickly than a new text can be created! 
>>> 
>>> Cheers, 
>>> Bill 
> 
> 

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