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Prof. Ian Short

Saint Mary's University
Email: ian.short@smu.ca

Date of Live Presentation: tba
Location: tba



Title

OpenStars: Modeling and visualizing stars with the world-wide-web

Abstract

The goal of the OpenStars project is to port the computational modelling and visualization of stars, and the habitable zones of their planets, from the confines of institutional research computing to the world of commonplace personal and classroom devices connected by the WWW, and to implement the modeling so that it is rapidly responsive and suitable for education and public outreach (EPO) while still being general, physics-based, and "credible enough". The modelling is implemented either in JavaScript (GrayStar app) or in Java (GrayStarServer app) and is thus platform-independent, and has an intuitive pedagogical interface written in JavaScript and HTML. The interface includes intuitive photo-realistic renderings of direct observables that will be meaningful to high school students, and serves as a public interactive science exhibit, and also has optional technical plots that make it suitable for parameter perturbation experiments at a more advanced level. Students can study the core modelling code and contribute to GrayStar on their own initiative through the developer console of any WWW browser. The project is a pathfinder for the longer term goal of research computing on the WWW itself with the cooperation of citizen scientists and school classes who donate cycles on personal and home devices. The talk will include demonstrations of the web-apps. The applications may be found at http://www.ap.smu.ca/OpenStars/ .


Short bio

Ian Short received his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Toronto, held postdoctoral fellowship positions at Armagh Observatory in Northern Ireland and the University of Georgia, and served on the Physics faculty at Florida Atlantic University before joining the Astronomy and Physics faculty at Saint Mary's University. He has contributed to the Phoenix stellar atmosphere and spectrum modelling code and has investigated how the improved treatment of thermodynamic equilibrium affects the modelled spectra of red giant and solar-type stars. His current interest is in implementing astrophysical computing and visualization in platform-independent web-deployment programing, scripting, and markup languages.


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