IDL Libraries

This is a fraction of the Astronomy libraries I've written thus far for IDL. I've posted only code that I've documented in some small degree or another for public consumption. This, in no way, implies that it is actually fit for human consumption i.e. bug free, complete or correct. Send suggestions, comments and so forth. (erosolow/at/cfa/harvard/edu)

The code contains many ideas that were sparked by other people. My thanks in particular to Douglas Finkbeiner who taught me more about IDL than anyone else.

So, who owns this code? I've hacked some RSI routines to behave like they should. They own that code. Everything else is freely distributable. That's right -- you could even pass it off as your own work, but then you have the humiliation for when that bug cripples your pipeline.

  -- Erik Rosolowsky

 Code evolves through time
  Bugs quashed as they surge upward
   Page updates daily

Update: Feb. 2006

I've gone through and done some IDL spring cleaning so the directories actually reflect somethink like the current state of the art. This includes removing some really embarassing bit o' code. If you actually miss anything that's gone, just let me know and I'll whip up something to replicate its function. The major change is to cull out all the obselete data-cube processing routines which are now subsumed in the CPROPS package.

Most of the routines here are little hack jobs that I came up with for one affair or another. There are a few that I use a lot or I think are interesting for some other reason. Here are a few highlights:

• DISP.PRO -- This is a plot wrapper to TVSCL in IDL, really useful for displaying images. If you're an astronomer, you might also like the /RADEC flag which labels the axes with the usual RA/DEC coordinates. This requires getting the RANAMES and DECNAMES functions in the same directory. DISP has a cousin, DISP3 which does the same thing but for 3 images -> a 3-color image.
• BINPLOT.PRO -- An add-on to DISP used for the visualization of many points in a scatter plot. This DISPs a grayscale histogram of the points and plots the individual points in bins lower than a specified threshold.
• SHOWFONT.PRO -- This is RSIs routine which prints out all the characters in a vector-drawn font. It's useful for figuring out what letter an omega corresponds to in font !7. This routine is adapted to plot the roman keyboard subscript in each window to make this association easy.
• EPLOT.PRO -- A plotting routine for data with uncertainties. Mostly useful for errors in both direction.
• COMPOSPEC.PRO -- A datacube processing routine which returns a spectrum summed over a region of interest defined by the use.
• LASSO_SUB.PRO -- Extracts a subcube from a datacube using an interactively defined region of interest. For REALLY BIG cubes, this can be done on disk with LASSO_BIGSUB.PRO
• SIGFIG.PRO -- Returns a string array for a variable that has been rounded to the specified number of significant figures.
• COLPRINT.PRO -- Prints up to 8 vector variables to the screen/file in columns. The niftiness includes significant figure / decimal place processing and including LaTeX table delimiters.
• INTERSECTION.PRO -- Returns the elements common to two arrays of any type except complex. Also can return where those elements appeared in the original array.
• HTRANSPOSE.PRO -- Transposes the axes of a FITS image while updated astrometry (useful for those radio astronomers who want to get from v-x-y to x-y-v and vice versa).
• HBORDER.PRO -- Pad a FITS array with a border of pixels with specified width and update astrometry accordingly.
• MAD.PRO -- Computes the median absolute deviation of an array -- it's like the standard deviation but sooo much better.
• RDHD.PRO -- A FITS header parser particularly useful for radio data.
• REMOVE_ISLANDS.PRO -- Removes isolated features with fewer than a specified number of pixels from a mask. Useful to suppress noise artifacts in image processing.
• CURVE_EXTRACT.PRO -- This program extracts the data values from a scanned-in image of a plot into IDL variables. I use this to get data from rotation curves that are published only as figures in papers.

Just so we're clear, all content on this website is solely the responsiblity of the author and not the NSF. This work is funded by NSF Grant AST-0502605