Please fill out survey HERE to make the course better for future iterations!
NOTE: These are ONLY to help me make the class better, not as a "grade" or anything like that silliness.
Just a few notes and ideas.
Computational Astrophysics
Among MANY other codes, here are some of the bigger open source ones:
FLASH - grid-based hydrodynamic (open source, but you have to apply to use it, some restrictions)
Gadget-2 - particle-based hydrodynamics
GIZMO - particle-based hydrodynamics with some fancy stuff
Astrophysical Visualization
Websites
Astroblend - shameless self promotion! This is my project, also there is an associated paper is available as well.
ytini - MORE shameless self promotion! This is another project I'm a part of, also there is an associated paper is available as well.
yt - a tool for analysis and visualization
Glue - developed by Alyssa Goodman and her group, useful for interacting with data in 3D
Dr. Brian Kent has some great Blender tutorials and how-to's and you can also buy his book on Amazon.
Dr. Rhys Taylor also does a lot of work in Blender including a volume rendering package.
Dr. Miguel Angel Aragon Calvo also also does a lot of work in Blender including some interactive stuff with Kinects.
I also work a bit with the NCSA Advanced Visualization Lab in Illinois who do a lot of planetarium and IMAX movies.
List of Cardboard VR setups on Amazon, ranging in
price from about $5-$20.
Bioblender is how some biologists are using Blender to visualize biology data.
x3d can be used to make 3D interactive plots in your papers.
Papers
AstroBlend paper - my paper on a library to visualize stuff with Blender
Dr. Brian Kent's paper on visualizing astronomy concepts and data with Blender
Dr. Rhys Taylor's paper on volume rendering astronomy data with Blender
There are several papers on Bioblender including this one
and this one