Consider hosting limb darkening data externally

[ivalaginja]

The repository size is massive due to data it contains for limb darkening. We should consider hosting that externally and set up for a direct download for people who clone the repository.

There are several solutions possible for this (Git LFS, hosting on services like Dropbox etc), we will need to look into what makes the most sense for this repo.

[hrwakeford]

I have a professional Dropbox account we can use for now. Or a OneDrive folder through my institution. But we could also wait for me to be back on site and see if we can host it on one of our servers, but that would be in the future.

If we want a solution to run now I would suggest going down the Dropbox route.

[ivalaginja]

That's awesome, and probably one of the better solutions! I have to look into how to set that up properly and will report back when I know more.

[hrwakeford]

The following is a link to a .zip file containing all the limb-darkening files.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3kqvg2m69ajvkpu/Limb-Darkeing_Archive.zip?dl=0
Is there a particular naming convention we should use here and what are the nest steps?

• We will need to change the README to point people to the file for download.
• We will need to set up a path location for where the users then put the limb-darkening file once they have downloaded it such that it is in a back compatible location. i.e if they did a pull it would still work for them

[ivalaginja]

This is en example of how it can be done:
https://webbpsf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html#installing-the-required-data-files
This would require setting up the package to read the environment variable of choice correctly, that should not be too complicated to do.