Wednesday 09:00 - 09:30

Tara Murphy

Introduction to the program.

Wednesday 09:30 - 10:00

Tim Cornwell

The programmable telescope

Wednesday 10:00 - 11:00

Matthew Whiting

This session is an introduction to Unix commands and assumes little or no experience with Unix. We first cover Unix essentials such as working with files and directories and commands for investigating the system. We end with some more advanced commands such as sed and grep which are useful for text processing. All exercises will use the bash shell.

Wednesday 10:00 - 11:00

James Curran

This session introduces some of the more advanced Unix commands, particularly those that use regular expressions for text processing. These include grep, sed and awk. We will cover some typical astronomy tasks such as selecting columns from a file and sorting data. We will also cover the basics of shell scripting. All exercises will use the bash shell.

Wednesday 11:30 - 13:00

Wednesday 15:00 - 15:30

Wednesday 16:00 - 17:00

James Curran

A lot of tasks require a small amount of programming, but typical languages used (eg. Fortran and C) have a large overhead. We introduce Python, a popular and easy to learn scripting language which is ideal for many small tasks, as well as being suitable for serious programming tasks. In the first Python sessions we introduce basic syntax and start writing small programs suitable for solving typical astronomy problems such as coordinate conversions.

These sessions will also incorporate tutorial exercises using our online programming environment.

Wednesday 14:00 - 15:00

James Curran

Version control makes your programming more productive, but is also good for papers, websites, course material and any other text-based files. It is also good for keeping things “in sync” between different machines (eg. home and work) or between multiple collaborators who have to modify the same files. This gives you a brief introduction to Subversion. Each person will be given access to a Subversion repository that they can use throughout the summer school.

Wednesday 17:00 - 18:00

Pamela Fox

An introduction to Google Sky and how to get your data into it.