Robert Izzard's Pages of Astronomical Happiness

WTTS • Window To The Stars by Robert Izzard and Evert Glebbeek

Window To The Stars

About Window to the Stars

WTTS news

Get WTTS:
Native Linux
Virtual machine (Linux, MacOS, Windows)
Docker (Linux, MacOS, Windows)
Raspberry Pi

Documentation

TWIN code

Stars for Schools

For Outreach, for Teaching, for Research.

We present Window To The Stars, a graphical user interface to the popular TWIN single/binary stellar evolution code, for novices, students and professional astrophysicists. It removes the drudgery associated with the traditional approach to running the code, while maintaining the power, output quality and flexibility a modern stellar evolutionist requires. It is currently being used for cutting edge research and interactive teaching.

Many thanks to Peter Eggleton, Evert Glebbeek, Ghina Halabi, Gemma Kerr, Michael Armstrong and Rahul Kakaiya for their generous help with the project.

WTTS News

The Stars for Schools programme
Window To The Stars is on display at:
- World Space Week 2023
- World Space Week in Guildford, 5th October 2019.
- The Institute of Astronomy public observing nights
- Seeing the Unseen at the University of Surrey
- The Royal Society Summer Science exhibition.
- Monash University astrophysics course.
WTTS version 2.13 has been released (26th October 2019).
Download instructions for Linux are here, you can also use the Virtual machine and Docker image on Linux, MacOS and Windows.
The original WTTS (version 0.39) can be downloaded from here.

Documentation

New Astronomy paper
Astronomy and Geophysics paper
Stars and Stellar Evolution computing exercises as used in my course at the University of Bonn.
IMPRS Heidelberg “summer” school lab course here (159KB PDF)
If you have trouble installing, please first Read The FAQ and then contact Robert Izzard at the address below.

Downloads: Latest stable version 2.12

The Linux installer has been tested on Ubuntu 18.04, Fedora 28 and OpenSuse 15. You may find it easier to use the Docker or Virtualbox image, especially on other operating systems such as MacOS and Windows.

WTTS2 on Linux

From a terminal, run the following commands, either:

curl -L -o linux_installer https://r-izzard.surrey.ac.uk/code/wtts2/linux_installer

chmod +x linux_installer

./linux_installer

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

chmod +x linux_installer

./linux_installer

WTTS2 with Virtualbox

A full virtual machine, based on Ubuntu 18, can be found at figshare (~4GB download) ready for use with Virtualbox on most platforms. Instructions for use of OVA files are here.

To update the virtual machine to the latest version, open a terminal (e.g. from the main menu, go to System Tools -> LXTerminal) and run the following commands:


cd $HOME
wget -N https://r-izzard.surrey.ac.uk/code/wtts2/installer
chmod +x installer
./installer local

WTTS2 with Docker

First, please install Docker on your platform.

Next, on Linux, run:


docker volume create wtts_volume

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

If you are using Docker on a Mac try this page.

WTTS2 on the Raspberry Pi

You can obtain an image for the Raspberry Pi, based on Raspbian Buster, at Zenodo. Instruction for burning the image are at this site.

TWIN stellar evolution code
You can download the TWIN code from this link. Many thanks to Peter Eggleton for allowing us to distribute his code and Evert Glebbeek for helping with many technical questions.

STARS code homepage
Cantanout - the competition (extinct!)

Surrey astro - IOA - CHU - SJC - STARS - BRIDGCE - UCam - Binary_c Online - Binary_c facebook - Tarantula

Contact: Email