Stars for Schools

Window to the Stars

The Window to the Stars software is the main tool used by students in the project. This is a graphical user interface to the TWIN stellar evolution code. You can think of this as like a web browser that makes your stars on a computer. You can read about Window to the Stars at Astronomy and Geophysics or New astronomy.

I've made some videos to introduce Window to the Stars: part 1, part 2 and part 3. Hopefully more will follow, if you like them.

TWIN

The TWIN stellar-evolution code is by Peter Eggleton and Evert Glebbeek. Written in FORTRAN and used by professional astrophysicists, TWIN is a fast, low-resource stellar-evolutionary modelling code that is used as the back-end to Window to the Stars.

Raspberry Pi

Stars for Schools is provided primarily for the Raspberry Pi 4 model B or Raspberry Pi 5 for which it is installed on a microSDHC card. You should download the latest image file from Zenodo (Raspberry Pi 4 or Raspberry Pi 5) and burn to the microSDHC card following these instructions. You then simply place the card in the Raspberry Pi and turn it on. All the required software (Linux, Window to the Stars and TWIN) is on this image alongside the Stars for Schools documentation.
Note: you need other hardware, for example a USB keyboard, a USB mouse and a monitor. We provide HDMI connectors, so please check that your monitors are HDMI compatible. HDMI is standard on almost all monitors made in the last 15 years, but if you want to use a different standard (e.g. VGA or DVI) you will need either a male-micro-HDMI to whatever cable, or a male-HDMI to whatever adapter.

Virtualbox

You can install the Window to the Stars software on your own PC using a Virtualbox virtual machine which can be downloaded from figshare. Virtualbox works on most operating systems, such as Windows, OSX, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris. To run WTTS, you just need to 1) download and install Virtualbox, 2) download the virtual machine from figshare, 3) run Virtualbox and use it to launch the virtual machine. Easy!

Docker

You can install the Window to the Stars software on your own PC Docker. Please see the instructions for installation of Docker and then run, from a terminal, run the following commands (you will probably want to put these in a script):


docker volume create wtts_volume
docker run \
       --name=wtts2 \
       -it \
       --rm \
       -e DISPLAY \
       --ipc=host \
       --mount source=wtts_volume,name=/home/wtts/wtts_rundir\
       -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
       -v $HOME/.Xauthority:/home/wtts/.Xauthority \
       robizzard/wtts:latest

Linux, including Raspberry Pis (4 and 5) already with an operating system.

You can install Window to the Stars on Linux using the following commands from a terminal. This works on Raspberry Pis with an operating system, e.g. Raspberry Pi OS, already installed, and is a good way to install WTTS2 on a Raspberry Pi 5 which has Raspberry Pi OS pre-installed.


wget https://r-izzard.surrey.ac.uk/code/wtts2/linux_installer
chmod +x linux_installer
./linux_installer

If you have a problem with installation, instead run this


wget https://r-izzard.surrey.ac.uk/code/wtts2/linux_installer
chmod +x linux_installer
./linux_installer 2>&1 | tee installer.log

This puts the log output into a file installer.log which you can then send to me.

Raspberry Pi screen resolution

To change the resolution, you should do the following:

Open a terminal.
Run the command arandr. This opens a dialogue box which contains grey boxes that represent your screen(s).
Right click on the grey HDMI-1 box.
Click Resolution then click the required resolution, e.g. 1920x1080.
Click Apply.
Ignore any error: you should see your screen changes its resolution as requested.

arandr homepage.

Bug fixes

From time to time bugs are found, but hopefully we can provide quick fixes.

TWIN CNUCX bug

Note: this bug has been fixed in the latest Zenodo image: please upgrade
This is a problem where TWIN fails to run because I accidentally gave you a slightly older version of TWIN because the current latest is not quite stable (working on this!). You can downgrade your TWIN.pm, the Perl interface module file, by removing references therein to the variables CNUCX, CNUCY, CNUCZ and CNUCD. For example, run the following commands from a terminal to do this automatically.


                                 cd $HOME/perl5/lib/perl5/WTTS_gtk3/ # where TWIN.pm is stored
                                 chmod +w TWIN.pm # make the file writable
                                 sed -i "/\b\(CNUCX\|CNUCY\|CNUCZ\|CNUCD\)\b/d" TWIN.pm # remove broken lines
                                 chmod -r TWIN.pm # remove write permission

Then delete the directory in which you are running WTTS (usually $HOME/wtts) and restart WTTS. Once I've managed to fix TWIN, I'll upgrade the image on Zenodo.

Computing