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Tao Tie (饕餮) - A curated collection of resources for astrophysical research

“The taotie is a motif commonly found on Chinese ritual bronze vessels from the Shang and Zhou dynasty...In ancient Chinese mythology like "Classic of Mountains and Seas", the "taotie" (饕餮) is one of the "four evil creatures of the world"...a greedy and gluttonous son of the Jinyun clan, who lived during the time of the legendary Yellow Emperor.” - Wikipedia

"缙云氏有不才子，贪于饮食，冒于货贿，天下谓之饕餮" - 《吕氏春秋·先识》

Motivation and Goals

• Over the past ~10 years, I have gradually accumulated some useful resources for astrophysical research and I believe the best way to make use of these information is to share them.
• The name taotie (饕餮) refers to a greedy and gluttonous monster in ancient Chinese myth. It is indeed very greedy and over-ambitious to collect all useful resources for astrophysics and cosmology.
• The goal of taotie is to become a curated list of resources for astronomy and astrophysics maintained by the community. Just like many other awesome lists available on GitHub. We hope taotie can become the first stop for new student or researcher in astronomy to seek for practical guidance and experience. And taotie can also be a handy and organized "bookmark" for researchers in different fields.

Progress and Plans

• Under Construction: This repo is still under heavy and frequent development. I am currently working on this as a weekend project.
• Currently working on improving the collections of taotie, especially for research fields outside my personal comfort zone. Any help will be highly appreciated!
• Also working on improving the presentation by making a user-friendly website based on a list of markdown files.

On Using taotie (饕餮)

• You can find taotie on this website

• Now taotie is available on both GitHub and GitLab. And you can also find taotie using this address

• For users in mainland China: in case the Github link below is not available, please replace github with gitlab and try again. Please let me know if you have trouble accessing both sites.

• The main language for taotie is English. Some of the important documents will be slowly translated into Chinese.

• Please let me know if you have any suggestion or recommendation.

Contents

Research in General

• Here, we tried to provide some basic information and practical guidance on important topics related to your life as a researcher. These topics include:
  • Start your life as a researcher in astronomy
    • A Chinese version is also available (中文版)
  • Getting a job inside or outside astronomy
  • Setting up your computer for research
  • Writing scientific papers
  • A little bit background in statistics
  • A little bit background in data science
  • Also some information about machine learning
    • Including the basic learning materials, some useful tools, and examples of applications in astronomy

Astronomy or Astrophysics Related Topics

• Basic tools for astrophysical research e.g. Flux, extinction, coordinates, and planning your observations. Whatever you need.
• Good reference for all astronomers: Reference and handbooks that will be handy in research.
• Useful resources and tools for specific field or topic. Right now, we collect some resources for topics about:
  • Basic astronomical CCD reduction
  • Photometry and photometric measurement in astrophysics
  • Spectroscopy and spectroscopic measurement in astrophysics
  • Extragalactic astrophysics
    • More details on different approaches to model galaxy formation and evolution
  • Galactic astronomy and Milky Way-related topics
  • Dust, inter-stellar or other diffuse medium in astrophysics (Help Needed)
  • Observational and theoretical cosmological research
    • More details on finding massive dark matter halo or galaxy group/cluster
    • More details on estimating photometric redshift
  • Gravitational lensing: micro, weak, and strong
  • Time-domain astrophysics and transient targets (Help Needed)
  • Observational and theoretical high-energy astrophysics (Help Needed)
  • Radio and sub-mm observations in astrophysics (Help Needed)
  • Exoplanet and astrobiology (Help Needed)
  • Astrophysical and cosmological numerical simulations
  • Stellar physics and the study of stellar population
  • Solar physics and space weather (Help Needed)
  • Solar system and planetary science (Help Needed)
• Information and resources about key projects in astrophysics and cosmology
  • We want to provide a list of "cheat sheets" for people who want to become familar with a specific project. Still under heavy constructions!!
  • Current list includes: Gaia satellite, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), and Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST)
  • Still working on including more projects like the Dark Energy Survey (DES), Euclid satellite, James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), etc.
• List of important references and reading list on some specific topics
  • This is still very preliminary and only reflects one person's taste and interests.
  • Recent review articles on arXiv
  • Reading list on some specific topics. Right now, only includes a few examples. e.g. on cosmology using galaxy clusters, on the splash-back radius of dark matter halo, and on the intrinsic alignment of galaxies and its impact on cosmology.
  • In the future, will separate them into different categories or sub-fields.

Programming and Developing Software

• Resources and tools for Python, which is the most popular programming language in astrophysics (for now).
  • Basic learning materials and documents for Python
  • On writing your own Python package
  • On improving the performance of your Python code
  • On fitting data, optimizing models...you know, astrophysics
  • On doing statistical analysis right in Python
  • On visualizing data using Python
• Resources and tools for the C programming language and the C++ programming langunage.
• Resources and tools for the Julia programming language
• Resources and tools for numerical method and scientific computing in general

Contribution

Contribution from the community is highly welcomed! Please feel free to fork the repo and make you own change. If you want your modifications be included in this repo, please submit a pull request (and make sure to describe the changes you made).

And if you notice anything wrong with the current content (wrong or unavailable link for example), please raise an issue.

Also, if your repo or project is included here and you are not comfortable with that, just let me know.

License

Copyright 2019 Song Huang and contributors.

taotie is under the MIT License. For details see the LICENSE file.