[Mesa-users] Questions on new colors module

[Benjamin Roulston]

Hi MESA friends,

I was so excited to see the new colors module in the latest release, so thank you for putting that together! I had a question (which may be a suggestion sorry).

With the new colors module, it seems so much easier to add our own filters (yay!). The documentation makes it seem as if we just simply point
instrument = '/data/colors_data/filters/Generic/Johnson’
To where our filters folder is and the filters will show up in the history data. However, as I’ve been working on this tonight, it looks as though this folder defaults to $MESA_DIR/$instrument

So to get our filters to work, we have to add files to $MESA_DIR. I’ve always treated the source code folder as something to not edit or add my own files to, since new versions will change and its better to keep all user defined files in the work directory of whatever job you’re working on. 

Is there a way to get this instrument variable to be a relative path to the current work directory? Or an absolute path on disk? Or is this actually an intended feature that I am misunderstanding?

Also, Niall Miller who was the lead on this actually has really good documentation on his website (https://nialljmiller.com/projects/MESA_CC/custom_coloUrs.html). A lot of this is not on the MESA documentation for the colors module, which I think it would be great to get some of these details there!

 - MESA version: r25.12.1
 - MESA SDK VERSION: mesasdk-aarch64-macos-25.12.1
 - OS: macOS Tahoe 26.3

Cheers,
- Ben
Dr. Benjamin R. Roulston
Assistant Professor & Director of Reynolds Observatory
Department of Physics
Clarkson University
Box 5820  |  8 Clarkson Ave.  |  Potsdam, New York 13699
Science Center 251  |  1–315–268–2349  |  benjaminroulston.com <mailto:roulston at clarkson.edu>

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