Interactive Data Language (IDL)
Our group uses IDL for all of our research projects. If you are a interested in learning IDL, you can download it from the ITT Website to use in demo mode for free, or students can purchase a student edition which costs about the price of an average textbook. See below for useful IDl sites, example programs, and other helpful tips.
Useful Sites
- Programming IDL for Astronomy (M. Perrin) - A very good introduction to IDL, with important philosophy too! (pdf)
- Four PDF files from C. Hiles, UCB Astro, provide a good introduction to IDL:
- IDL help page written by Eric Williams, former SFSU student and planetsearcher, and updated by Roy Kilgard
- D. Fanning's (Coyote's) IDL tips and tricks
- IDL Astronomy Library
- C. Markwardt's IDL library - a great site for learning to fit functions with Levenberg-Marquardt algorithms - used frequently!
Example Programs
Here are two example programs which demonstrate the syntax of IDL:
Helpful Tips
When someone in our group finds an answer to an IDL question, we try to share it here:
- Setting up IDL for the 1st Time and Making Plot Backgrounds White, Not Red. Matt Giguere
- Configuring the IDL License Manager to Start Automatically in Mac OS X. Matt Giguere
- IDL functions for job-splitting over multiple processes/CPUs. David Abouav
- IDL Background Jobs. Peter Driscoll
- Info on IDL Licenses. Chris McCarthy
- COMMON Blocks in IDL. Raman Narayan
- Making an IDL graph into a JPG (JPEG) file. N. Bozorgnia
Photo by Julien Spronck
