IDL

IDL is a commercial software package by providing a fully-featured interactive programming environment, including sophisticated plotting, image analysis, debugging and GUI-building capabilities. As such, it is particularly popular within image-intensive scientific communities such as engineering, geophysics and (last but not the least!) astronomy! Unpleasant as the use of commercial software might be, since its 6.0 release IDL supports saving of compiled code to a format that can be read by the freely-downloadable IDL Virtual Machine, thus the possibility to share your work with anybody, albeit not the chance to allow them to carry out further development without purchasing a license. Besides, a thriving community has in time produced a large and varied body of resources and made them available on the web.

Some Software of mine...

NB : software is made available following the Free/Open-Source paradigm, or more exactly following these licensing terms

myidllib : My Small & Humble IDL Library

As part of my life-as-an-astronomer's daily grind, I occasionally write software bits which might come in handy to the astro folks out there. These are now packaged as myidllib : My Small & Humble IDL Library

LARI Method

As part of my PhD Thesis I developed a lot of software aimed at the reduction and analysis of astronomical imaging data obtained by the ISO satellite using the LARI Method. This is now packaged as the LARI Package for ISO-CAM/PHOT Data Reduction and Analysis.

GAIA Galaxy Survey

Here's some of the IDL software I wrote to simulate the performance achievable by the GAIA Galaxy Survey, an all-sky multi-color galaxy survey project planned with the GAIA satellite. Please refer to my Master's Thesis for a more thorough description of its purpose than it is given in the rare comments!

psf.pro : Generation and Plotting of GAIA Point Spread Functions

sim_stack.pro : Simulation and Stacking of GAIA Observations of Galaxies

stack_bis.pro : Stacking of GAIA Observations of Galaxies (Alternative Technique)

stack_tris.pro : Stacking of GAIA Observations of Galaxies (Drizzling-like Technique)

Please contact Mattia Vaccari for further information

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