Notes for getting started with Starfish

Hi folks, I recently emailed some Starfish quick start notes to a colleague, and thought I'd post them here in case they are useful to anyone else. More tips/tricks for newcomers are welcomed below.

Here are some general tips for getting started with Starfish:

All the code is on GitHub, either in Ian Czekala's original version, or my fork:
Ian's original version: https://github.com/iancze/Starfish
My fork: https://github.com/gully/Starfish

My active branch for the last year supports all sorts of extensions to Starfish, including:

• The ability to sample all stellar and nuisance parameters at once with the robust "emcee" algorithm.
• Nominal support for using the Marley et al. synthetic spectral models (in prep.)
• Several extensions to support "separable" model physics: mixture models from starspots, spectroscopic binaries, disk veiling, extinction, etc.
• Correctly supports flux-calibrated spectra

All of these extensions are undocumented here:
https://github.com/gully/Starfish/tree/mix_model_omega2

The best place to get started on understanding the code is:

• Read Ian's paper http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2015ApJ...812..128C
• Read Section 3 of my paper http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017ApJ...836..200G
• Review these slides on how the emcee MCMC algorithm works: https://speakerdeck.com/dfm/data-analysis-with-mcmc
• Review this slideshow on probabilistic programming in Python:
  https://speakerdeck.com/dfm/pyastro16
• Review these slides on Gaussian Processes for Astronomy, only up to slide 60:
  https://speakerdeck.com/dfm/an-astronomers-introduction-to-gaussian-processes-v2
• Read the documentation and demos here:
  http://iancze.github.io/Starfish/current/index.html

The most up-to-date info and conversations about the code occur in the open in the GitHub issues. I recommend a newcomer read through these to get a sense for the limitations and opportunities of the code.
https://github.com/iancze/Starfish/issues

All my code for my 2017 paper is free/public here, including some helpful Jupyter-notebooks:
https://github.com/BrownDwarf/welter/tree/master/notebooks

Start by reviewing the existing Starfish documentation and demos linked in the issue, then compare them with the listed newcomer notes and undocumented extensions. No target file or test is named; done would mean agreeing on a documentation location and adding clearly scoped getting-started guidance there.