Adding a "Step 0" tutorial for getting a computer ready to run Lightkurve tutorials

[tylerapritchard]

This is a markdown document detailing the installation and startup of anaconda and jupyter notebooks across computing environments (with supporting images/gifs) that could be added as a tutorial for a user who is unsure of how to get started working with the Lightkurve tutorials. This document has overlap with both the quickstart and installation instructions, but describes the steps in possibly excruciating detail.

As background - we’ve been working on a “Step-0” tutorial at TESS-GI that’s aimed at new students/interns/anyone with minimal computational experience that’s designed to take someone from a fresh computing environment to working in a Jupyter notebook and ready to run further Jupyter notebook tutorials for the TESS mission, and @christinahedges suggested that this may be a useful doc for Lightkurve as well.

[christinahedges]

Hi @orionlee and @barentsen, Tyler has worked hard on a great tutorial to help users get started with lightkurve based on some hiccups we'd had with students unable to use lightkurve. I think it'd be a great addition to the docs. Is this something you'd be interested in including on lightkurves webpage? If there are any new style guides for tutorials that we should follow, please let us know and we'll update the tutorial.

[scfleming]

This is really cool. Another note to consider adding to the lightkurve page is to encourage students to check out the TESS Integrated Knowledge Engine (TIKE) at MAST. It's a science platform that already has lightkurve, all dependencies, and tutorial notebooks pre-installed and ready to start coding in right away!

https://timeseries.science.stsci.edu

If something is missing that students would find helpful to get started with using TIKE on the platform, we'd love to know so we can address it.

[christinahedges]

This is fantastic yes, last time I heard about TIKE it was a development feature, is this now a stable MAST offering that we can advertise to users?

[scfleming]

Absolutely, it officially launched last AAS meeting. I would point first time users to the science_examples which is the big list of tutorials, including lightkurve ones, they can start using right away.

[scfleming]

The very first time it will take a couple minutes to spin up the AWS instance, but after that as long as the instance is running it's much faster to jump in. Might be worth giving students a head's up on that if you decide to link it, which we would definitely appreciate because we want to grow user base!

[tylerapritchard]

That's fantastic Scott, thanks - I had missed that TIKE is officially launched - we can definitely update and include TIKE in our discussion of web-based notebook environments

[orionlee]

A "step 0" tutorial could be helpful to new users with limited computing / Python experience.
I wonder for the target audience whether a video might be more effective.

If we decide to add step 0, some additional work would need to connect the Step0.md into documentation build.