Exercises

Access to the individual exercises for each week is through the Schedule page, or from this short introduction and overview.

CVS

Your access to the IDL material is organized using CVS, so the first thing you need to do is to look at the

• Instructions for setting up and using CVS

The purpose of the material is to open up the possibility of "learning by playing". There are (or will be) several levels of interactivity:

1. Ready-to-run experiments, such as
   • Sound waves
   • Alfvén waves
   • Advection
   • The classical shock tube
   • MHD shock and tests
     • The Brio & Wu MHD shock tube
     • MHD tests by Kim et al.

   To run these experiments do (preferably on ursa):

   	cd ~/astro2000/idl/obj
   
   	cvs update -A 		[ main version ]
   	idlde5			[ or idl5 ]
   	... ***)
   	IDL> widgets
   	....
   	IDL> exit
   
   

   ***) Make sure to set the IDL path correctly from within the IDL Development Environment-idlde-before giving the widgets command.  Also, take a look at your ~/.Xdefaults file.

2. Interactive experiments, where you set up your own initial condition, and try to predict what will happen. Push the "evolve" button, and see if it does. Go back and forth between the theory (i.e., the basic principles) and the experiment, until you understand why and how things happen, and you can predict with some confidence the effect of changing the setup.

   This part is not yet open, but will be in a few days. Check out in the CVS instructions how to automatically get an email when the material is updated.

3. Your very own experiments. These are experiments that you add to the Experimentarium yourself. It is relatively easy to take an already existing experiment, and make a variation of it, typically by changing the initial data. Look for a file with the name experiment__define.pro, give it another name, and check it in on your private branch of the CVS repository.

Last updated 24-feb-2000 / Åke Nordlund, email:aake@astro.ku.dk