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Installing OSCAAR can be done in these steps:
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Download the required dependencies
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Download the current beta version of OSCAAR by clicking the
ZIPbutton at the bottom right of the Code page, or by clicking here. As of writing this wiki page, we're in rapid development mode, so we haven't bundled a stable beta or v2.0 release for you to download. The ZIP archive is always the most up-to-date version of the repository, and we'll use this as our temporary distribution method. Check back for updates, and if you have any questions, feel free to email us at oscaarteam@gmail.com
Thorough documentation to guide you through taking your first transiting exoplanet observations and analyzing them with OSCAAR is being developed here.
Download the OSCAAR-extras repository for extra tools and tutorials to help you get started with OSCAAR. In particular, we include a sample data set generator that you can use to make a series of simulated images that contain a transit for you to recover using OSCAAR. We recommend using OSCAAR first on a sample data set like this to get your bearings.
OSCAAR has a two main kinds of documentation, both of which are being updated continuously. We first direct you to our PDF/LaTeX documentation which has lengthy descriptions on everything from observing techniques to algorithm notes. To find this PDF, click this link and then click "View Raw" to download a copy. For those coders who may like to interface with specific OSCAAR methods, there is also internal documentation (essentially comments) written for most methods within the OSCAAR source code, which has been parsed and published via ReadTheDocs.
The original OSCAAR team at the University of Maryland created OSCAAR because we wanted to observe transiting exoplanets at our small campus observatory, but our faculty and staff at the time had never used our observatory for such observations. We experimented with different observing and analysis techniques until we got our first transit light curve of HD 189733 b in the summer of 2011. We immediately wanted to share what we learned, and in the two years since then we've built OSCAAR for use by others like us -- with access to basic observing equipment and a drive to observe transiting exoplanets, who need a place to start.
OSCAAR is continuously being enhanced and expanded by an open community of active observers and astronomers. Our contributors today span from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center to the University of Leiden, and observers getting started with OSCAAR reach from Vestal, New York to Athens, Greece. If you're interested in using or contributing to OSCAAR, we look forward to welcoming you into the community! Don't be shy to ask how you can get involved! Contributing to OSCAAR makes a great undergraduate research project, for example.
We're excited to show you why we love Python for scientific computing. If you're interested in experimenting with the source code but you're just now seeing Python for the first time, you may want to take a peak inside any of these free Python e-books that will give you some idea of what's going on.
Looking for an IDE to use? We recommend Eclipse with PyDev for Mac and Windows, and Spyder for Linux.
We are trying to take full advantage of GitHub's infrastructure for facilitating an open source community, so we've been using the Issue Tracking tool to log bugs as we find them and to take suggestions for enhancements. If you have a stubborn problem, even if you think it's your fault, post a new issue here and find help from an oscaar team member.
We're currently sorting out how OSCAAR should be cited, though a good place to start is by citing our presentation of OSCAAR at the American Astronomical Society meeting in the summer of 2013. If you use OSCAAR for your work, we'd appreciate it if you contact us about how to cite it.