[Mesa-users] Introducing MESA Explorer

[Wolf, William M]

Hello mesa users,

I’m pleased to introduce a new tool for quickly making visualizations of data from MESA simulations, called MESA Explorer<billwolf.space/mesa-explorer>, which is a web app you can find at billwolf.space/mesa-explorer.

What does it do?
You can make plots from MESA output with the following features:

  *   Plot one or two columns on ordinate axes against a common column on the abscissa
  *   Plot data as a line and/or points
  *   Optionally transform data before plotting:
     *   Rezero
     *   Absolute value
     *   Exponentiate/Logarithm
  *   Scale axes as linear or logarithmic
  *   Label axes with autogenerated (buy customizable) labels
  *   Customize axis limits
  *   Download the plot as an svg (you can then edit or export to pdf using tools like Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator)

How does it work?
Once the page has loaded, all actions are handled locally. That is, no data is uploaded to a server or processed elsewhere. In fact, once you have accessed the web page, you do not need an internet connection. As a result, most actions are quite fast. The only exception is if you try to load in many files at once, in which case you’ll have to wait a few seconds for the data to be available.

The first thing you do is load in files (you can load more than one at once) in the left pane. Once you have loaded and selected a file, you can build a plot based on the data from the selected file and view it in the right pane.

How can I use this?
This is not a replacement for general plotting tools and strategies, as it is still quite limited in customizability. The impetus for this project was instead for use in educational or training situations where mastering a plotting tool is not a main goal. One could use it in a class that is using MESA Web<http://user.astro.wisc.edu/~townsend/static.php?ref=mesa-web> or for a MESA tutorial session.

It is also quite useful for basic investigation for researchers. For instance, profiles are organized in the file pane in order of their model number, so you can click through profiles in order to view the evolution of a profile plot in a convenient way. It may also be useful for rapid visualization in a group meeting context.

How can I suggest improvements?
The source code is available at https://github.com/wmwolf/mesa-explorer. Feel free to open an issue<https://github.com/wmwolf/mesa-explorer/issues> if you see something unexpected or have a suggestion for an enhancement.

Regards,

Bill Wolf
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