Jupyter notebooks, python code, and selected data files and sources for the figures from Celestial and Stellar Dynamics by Barbara Ryden.
Publication expected in February 2025...
Celestial and Stellar Dynamics by Barbara S. Ryden is the third volume in The Ohio State Astrophysics Series of textbooks published by Cambridge University Press. The audience for this series is graduate students and upper-level undergraduates studying astronomy and physics.
Most of the original figures in this book were created by the Richard Pogge (OSU), the technical editor of the OSAS book series, the majority of which are plots of data or calculations made using Python programs implemented as Jupyter notebooks. We are making all the notebooks available on GitHub as an ancillary to the book.
Instructors and students using Celestial and Stellar Dynamics are welcome to use these notebooks to make high-resolution versions of the book figures for presentations, adapt them for use in class, or to use as the basis for problem sets or projects in courses adopting this book. Over time we hope to collect and present other notebooks that will enable further explorations of topics in the book, become part of computational problem sets or individual and group projects, etc. This way, the figures become a starting point for learning and new explorations rather than being frozen into print.
All notebooks were developed in Python 3 using the Anaconda Python distribution.
Required packages are numpy, scipy, pandas, matplotlib, and astropy, all part of Anaconda.
LaTeX is required for math symbols in the notebooks.
Note: Please update matplotlib to later than version 3.8 as the contour routines changed significantly compared to previous versions and we made use of some low-level features that required changes to the code that are not backwards compatible with older versions.
Some of the figures in the book use the galpy Python package for galactic dynamics by Jo Bovy.
Because galpy is relatively efficient and easy to install, we do all the galpy calculations in-situ in the notebooks.
Another set of figures uses the Python version of the rebound N-body integrator package
developed by Hanno Rein and collaborators. Because installation of rebound is more involved and runtimes can be long,
we provide pre-computed rebound models for the relevant notebooks, but inlclude the notebooks that ran rebound for the figures
as a supplement.
The galpy and rebound packages have active user communities and there are many examples and guides to help you explore these
powerful programs on your own.
Supplementary exercises for students using galpy and rebound are being contemplated and may be released later on this
repository.
To download a copy of this repository onto your local computer, go to the folder on your computer where you want to install it and type
git clone https://github.com/CambridgeUniversityPress/Celestial-and-Stellar-Dynamics
This will create the Celestial-and-Stellar-Dynamics folder containing the entire repository. You may rename this repository after
installation to shorten the name if you wish (e.g., /path/to/wherever/CSD).
To update your copy, go into the top-level folder you created above (e.g., /path/to/wherever/CSD) and type
git pull
If there are no updates, your local copy will be unaffected.
The notebooks and their contents are original works of the authors and often include data obtained from public archives or from professional colleagues (always from published sources). We ask that users preserve all literature citations to the original work from which such data were derived, and give proper credit when using them. If you use these notebooks, please make reference to the Celestial and Stellar Dynamics book and this repository.
All files in this repository are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, to foster broader use of the notebooks and their data by teachers and students.