Astro Interactives is a series of Jupyter Notebooks meant to provide interactive demos and simulations for introductory astronomy courses (and in a few cases, upper-division astrophysics courses). These notebooks were initially developed by
The goal was to replace many of the Adobe Flash-based tools that we use in labs using applications we created in-house. This allows much greater tunability to our needs AND is likely to be usable much farther into the future since Adobe Flash's end of life is set for the end of 2020.
This software is provide "as-is" and may contain bugs/errors that could mis-represent astronomical reality. You use this software at your own risk! Keep in mind the authors are not professional programers!
The currently available Interactives are the following:
The following interactives are meant to be used in an upper-division astrophysics class as a way of introducing $\ell$-v diagrams and 21-cm spectra. These are not really meant to introduce the concepts but rather to allow students to explore how the distribution of neutral hydrogen gas both in position and velocity affects the observed $\ell$-v diagram of the Milky Way galaxy and the HI spectra of external galaxies.