notebooks

Jupyter notebooks

To develop Python code interactively we will make extensive use of Jupyter, a Python-based web application that launches a collection of Jupyter notebooks. Note, the Jupyter software package is already installed as part of the black-hole-3.7 Conda environment.

Before using Jupyter, open your Conda Powershell or Terminal app, activate the Conda environment, and move to your local clone of this repository:

Mac/Linux

(base) $ conda activate black-hole-3.7
(black-hole-3.7) $ cd ~/src/black-hole-astrophysics/notebooks

Windows

(base) C:\Users\myname>conda activate black-hole-3.7
(black-hole-3.7) C:\Users\myname>cd ~\src\black-hole-astrophysics\notebooks

Using Jupyter

To launch a Jupyter server on your computer, on either Mac/Linux or Windows, execute the following:

jupyter notebook

This will open the notebooks/ folder in Jupyter. To open a specific notebook, e.g. classical-orbits.ipynb, you can do

jupyter notebook classical-orbits.ipynb

The notebook itself will have a standard file menu allowing you to save, quit, and do various other actions. If you ever need to kill the server from your Powershell or Terminal window, you can do that by hitting CTRL+C.

The blocks of code within a Jupyter notebook are called cells. To run these, either use the menu at the top of the page (the button that says Run or the dropdown menu Cell) or on your keyboard hit SHIFT+RETURN or SHIFT+ENTER. These cells are meant to be run in sequential order, so if you go back and make a change to a previous cell, in general you should re-run the later cells as well.