jradavenport_idl

General purpose IDL tools written by @jradavenport

This is a collection of routines that I have created to help make using IDL easier on a daily basis. These include astronomy, plotting, binning/smoothing, and general helper routines. Most have thorough documentation.

Other IDL repositories I've authored

• FBEYE - an IDL suite for analyzing Kepler light curves and validating flares
• flaregrid - Flare colors for SDSS and 2MASS bands for M0-M6 dwarf stars
• simplephot - a simple routine for time series differential photometry on a stack of images. Can do basic image reduction too. Good for on-the-fly analysis!

Astronomy Routines

• astro_const.pro: large list of astronomical/physical constants in cgs units. Fairly high precision, very useful!
• brute_match.pro: a brute-force 2D nearest neighbor match using a search radius. Good for RA,Dec list matching.
• ra2id.pro: convert (ra,dec) in decimal degrees to string with Jhhmmss.s+ddmmss.s format. Good for generating object names in tables
• radec_decimal.pro: Convert (ra,dec) coordinates to decimal degrees
• apoexpcal.pro: A simple exposure time calculator for instruments at Apache Point Observatory

Plotting Routines

• contour_plus.pro: create contour plots or contour+scatter (for high density data) plots from (x,y) points. Makes many semi-intelligent choices for contour levels, etc. Uses Histogram for excellent speed and scalability.
• cubehelix.pro: full implementation of the CubeHelix color map.
• pixel_contour.pro: make a contour plot using pixels
• posgen.pro: position keyword generator, a grid-based framework to create multi-panel plots with varying sizes and positions
• pixel_plus.pro: compute values over third dimension for (x,y) data, such as median
• luckycharms.pro: silly symbol set based on sugary breakfast cereal
• plotstuff.pro: set a few system variables for nicer looking plot defaults

Binning and Smoothing

• supsmu.pro: IDL implementation of SuperSmoother, a variable span smoothing algorithm
• pdm_sp.pro: Phase Dispersion Minimizer using Splines
• pdm_ss.pro: Phase Dispersion Minimizer using SuperSmoother, good to search for periodic signals in data
• softserve.pro: an iterative variable span smoother for light curves... YMMV. Used in FBEYE.
• medbin.pro: in (x,y) data find median values of y in bins of x.
• todcor.pro: Two Dimensional Cross Correlation script, useful for measuring radial velocities using two templates

Helpful Things & Stats

• strfunc.pro: Compute the "structure function" of a time series or light curve. Uses IDL Historgam for speed.
• randomp.pro: generate random numbers from a powerlaw distribution
• geomean.pro: compute geometric mean for an array
• perror.pro: compute asymmetric Poisson error (good for general use)
• gerror.pro: compute symmetric Poisson error (use in a pinch, not as good as perror)
• mail.pro: simple wrapper for using linux mail command, send you emails from IDL
• null99.pro: helper script to convert string "null" to -99. Good for reading data from SQL tables, etc (e.g. from IPAC)
• psym.pro: helper script to simply print the default plot symbols when you forget them... which I do every day.
• real.pro: convert NaN and InF (+/-) values in a vector to real floating point numbers, useful to avoid math problems downstream.