IDL Resources

Astrophysics specific IDL Software Sites

• ACS (Advanced Camera for Surveys) analysis software The ACS was installed on the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2002. The calibration team IDL software includes procedures for spreadsheet and sound file manipulation along with calibration image analysis.
• AOred Adaptive Optics reduction package AOred is an IDL package written by Jason Marshall and Mitchell Troy at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) for the reduction of images obtained with PALAO - the Adaptive Optics System for the Palomar 200" Telescope. Last updated January 2000.
• ASCA (Advanced Satellite for Cosmology and Astrophysics) reduction software An informal set of IDL routines for reduction of ASCA and AXAF data written by Andy Ptak at Carnegie Mellon & Tahir Yaqoob at Goddard Space Flight Center. Last updated February 1998.
• AIT (Astronomical Institute of Tübingen) IDL software The AIT Library includes IDL procedures for analyzing X-ray astronomy data, and provides a nice up-to-date interface to the IDL Astronomy Library. It also provides access to the TRIPP (Time Resolved Imaging PHotometry Package) software, and to procedures for time-series analysis.
• ATV Image Display Tool ATV is an image display widget written by Aaron Barth (CalTech), that is modeled after the SAOimage display package. The current version is 1.3, last modified 28-Nov-2000 and includes astronomical coordinate tracking, radial profile plots, choice of coordinate systems, and the ability to read FITS extensions.
• Big Bear Observatory FITS & JPEG Display Software Contains the IDL widget program BBSOFITS to display and process FITS and JPEG images. Last updated November 1997.
• CHIANTI: A Database for Astrophysical Emission Line Spectroscopy CHIANTI consists of a suite of IDL programs and a database of atomic data for calculating synthetic spectra in the region between 50 A and 1100 A. This site at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) includes extensive documentation. Version 3.03 was released December 2001. The Package for Interactive Analysis of Line Emission (PINTofALE) at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CFA) uses CHIANTI for the analysis of spectroscopic data from optically-thin coronal plasmas. Last updated 07 December 2001.

• Robert O'Connell (U. of Virginia) has written a guide to IDL for Astronomers including exercises for class work. Carl Heiles (UC Berkeley) has written a set of postscript file tutorials on Learning IDL for Astronomy . The University of Oklahoma Astronomy IDL Page provides IDL code for astronomy instruction at several different levels and for supernovae research.

• Three of the four instruments on GRO include IDL in their data reduction packages. The WINGSPAN (WINdows Gamma SPectral Analysis) software was written primarily in IDL to analyze data from the Burst and Transient Source Experiment (BATSE). The IGORE (Interactive GRO/OSSE Reduction Environment) FTP site contains IDL data analysis software for the OSSE (Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment). The SKYMAP package contains IDL software for analyzing Energetic Gamma-Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) maps.
• Group K IDL User's Library This is a collection of general purpose and high energy astrophysics routines written by members of the particle astrophysics group at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. A good site for mathematics and statistics routines
• HIIphot V5.0 Software This IDL software package developed by D. Thilker (NMSU, 2000 AJ, 120, 3070 ) is designed for accurate photometric characterization of H II regions while permitting genuine adaptivity to irregular source morphology. HIIphot utilizes object recognition techniques to make a first guess at the shapes of all sources and then allows for departure from such idealized ``seeds'' through an iterative growing procedure.

• /beck the neural network classifier procedure nnet.pro and training program train_nnet.pro
• /bhill The object-oriented display widgets XCTV, XCTV2, XCTVN for roaming, zooming, scaling and examining pixel values in one, two or many images (last updated 11-Dec-2001).
• /freudenreich ROBLIB, a set of mathematical and statistical procedures for robust data analysis
• /knight LOOK - a (large) widget image display program
• /landsman Programs for converting between IDL V4 parenthesis and V5 brackets.
• /malumuth TCTOOL - a widget for optimizing a true-color image
• /maskinterp a package from Joe Harrington (Cornell) giving a variety of 2-d bad pixel interpolation methods
• Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) software The Instrument Definition Teams for ISO developed their interactive analysis software in IDL, and the software and documentation can be accessed from the ISO Data Center in VillaFranca, Spain. Access to the ISO software in the U.S. is available from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) . The ISO Spectral Analysis Package (ISAP) was last updated March 11, 2002 (V3.0). The LWS Interactive Analysis (LIA) package was last updated Nov 1, 2001 (V10). The ISOPHOT Interactive Analysis Package (PIA) was last updated Jan 9, 2001 (V9.1).
• LACOSMIC (LAplacian COSMIC ray identification) software LACOSMIC (Van Dokkum 2001, PASP, 113, 1420) is an algorithm for robust cosmic ray identification using Laplacian edge detection. IDL code is included at Peter van Dokkum's CalTech website for the case of imaging.
• Marc Buie's Astronomy IDL software (CCDPHOT, ITOOL) Includes the IDL widget programs CCDPHOT to process CCD data, and ITOOL for general image processing, which were developed at Lowell Observatory for the processing of solar system CCD images. Contains many useful IDL procedures for astronomical analysis

• The analysis software for the COsmic Background Explorer (COBE) was primarily written in IDL and includes extensive documentation. Version 4.1 of this software was released in June 1999. More recently, the COMBAT (Cosmic Microwave Background Analysis Tools) Collaboration has developed FORECAST (FOREgrounds and CMB Anisotropy Simulation Tools), an IDL package to selectively display IRAS/DIRBE data. The HEALPIX (Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelisation) collaboration includes IDL software for fast and accurate statistical and astrophysical analysis of full-sky data sets (Version 1.10 updated March 2000).
• Multi-Gaussian Expansion (MGE) Fits to Galaxies An IDL package MGE_FIT_SECTORS written by Michele Cappellari (Leiden Observatory), including examples and instructions, to obtain an efficient MGE parameterization for a galaxy surface brightness.
• NICMOS (Near Infrared Camera & Multi-Object Spectrometer) Software Site at the University of Arizona. Includes widget tools for general image display (NICLOOK, IDP3), to edit headers of groups of FITS files (FHE), to examine multi-extension FITS files (FITSTOOL), Lucy deconvolution (LUCY), and to subtract a PSF. Additional software is available at the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) NICMOS Page including the widget image display program NICMOSLOOK for manual extraction of grism images, and the program CalnicC for automated extractions.
• PIXON software distribution site The pixon image reconstruction technique has been widely used in astronomy, and IDL source code implementing an early version of this algorithm is available upon request.
• Small Bodies Node (SBN) at the University of Maryland IDL procedures for reading images and tables in the Planetary Data System (PDS) format. Last updated 19-Jul-2001.

• Some researchers from SDSS institutions keep their analysis software for SDSS images and spectra publicly available. Eric Scott Sheldon maintains the U. of Michigan IDL SDSS library . The IDL SDSS software at Princeton can be downloaded as tar files, and documentation is available for the IDLSPEC2D and IDLUTILS libraries.
• Solar Software Library Includes a very large number of general and solar-related IDL procedures accessible via FTP . Search pages for these procedures are available at the Yohkoh Web Page at Lockheed and the SOHO search page . Also, Dominic Zarro has written IDL code using object oriented methods for analyzing solar images, and a guide to using IDL Sockets to manipulate files over a Web server.
• STARFINDER software STARFINDER is a well-documented widget package at the Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna for obtaining high-precision astrometry and photometry of crowded stellar fields. Requires IDL V5.0 or later.
• Stuart's Astronomy IDL Collection Stuart Colley at University College London (UCL) makes available some of his IDL software dealing with astronomical spectra, including procedures for merging echelle orders, Fourier CLEANing, and temporal variance spectrum (TVS) analysis. Last updated: 16 May 2001.
• Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (UIT) software
• The UIT image display software for the was a precursor to the IDL Astronomy Library, but has some additional routines for image display and astrometry. Last updated in 1995 so it is pretty obsolete.

• Some of the ultraviolet spectral analysis software (e.g. multiple Gaussian fits) might be useful for analysis on other types of spectral data. The IUE (International Ultraviolet Explorer) Data Analysis Center is probably the oldest (but still active) IDL-based data analysis package (last updated June 1999). The GHRS (Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph IDL software package (last updated December 1996) is available for VMS, Unix or PC systems. Most of the IDL software from the STIS (Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph) IDT (Instrument Definition Team) is not made available to the public (!?), but one program that is available is the the widget program HST_PLANNER, for planning observations with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The FUSE (Far Ultraviolet Spectrographic Explorer) IDL software includes some excellent general useful tools for the analysis of 1-d spectra (last updated 5-Apr-2001). The FUSE IDL software documentation was last updated 14-Feb-2001.
• TARA (Tools for ACIS Real-time Analysis) TARA is an IDL widget which was developed at Penn State University for for the pre-launch calibration of the AXAF CCD Imaging Spectrometer (ACIS), now aboard the Chandra (formerly AXAF) X-ray observatory. Additional software is available to correct for the charge-transfer inefficiency (CTI) in the in-flight ACIS detectors. Also, the HETG Analysis Kit (HAK) software is available for analyzing data from the High-Energy Transmission Grating (HETG) aboard Chandra.
• Fred Walter's IDL Software This site at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stonybrook includes the ICUR package developed by Fred Walter & Jim Neff for the analysis of 1-d astronomical spectra, and a package for the photometric reduction of Kitt Peak near-infrared images.
• U. of Washington Astronomy IDL Page Includes IDL software by Eric Deutsch for general (non-widget) image display, deconvolution, and pretty postscript output. Also includes a nice search page for many public IDL libraries.
• IDL Astronomy Library Home Page

General

• Astronomical Software Directory Service Allows users to search on a variety of astronomical software packages (including but not limited to IDL)
• FITS Archive at NRAO The main source for information about the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) data format, which is widely used in astronomy.
• Systems of Time This site at the US Naval Observatory explains the time systems (e.g. Julian date, UTC) used in astronomy.