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Eric Deutsch
Department of Astronomy, University of Washington
 
U of W Astronomy IDL Page


This page last updated on 26-Mar-1999

Interactive Data Language (IDL) from Research Systems, Inc. is a powerful programming environment which has become popular with many in the field of Astronomy and other research fields which require data visualization. This has led to many public-domain libraries which contain thousands of useful routines. This site makes available a few contributions from people at this department, provides a few links to other stuff on the Web, and also provides a simple search engine for many public domain libraries.

On-line Help!

RSI provides a useful hypertext help tool to browse and search the IDL manuals and supplied procedures. RSI does not provide a very good help system for the thousands of public-domain procedures and functions available on the Web. I have attempted to built such a system, at least for the libraries which I have installed locally here on our computers (this does not include all of the available procedures, of course!)

Some IDL-related Sites on the Web

This is only a small subset of what's available, but others have done a great job making more comprehensive lists of links, so I won't try. Follow the links here to other pages of links and you'll find most everything!

Pretty Postscript Output

NOTE: The following section may possibly be obsolete due to new features in IDL 5.0. However, I have not yet learned how to use the WYSIWYG features of IDL 5.0, and still do it this way.

IDL has the capability of creating some really gorgeous output on Postscript printers. The snag is that it's not trivial to do fancy stuff; it's hard to get started and then screen output doesn't like what you get on the printer. For this reason, I've posted a little information about generating nice Postscript output. Here's some relevant stuff:

Deutsch IMG Library for IDL

The DEUTSCH IMG library contains a collection of procedures useful for astronomical work with the IDL Programming Language. There are several "general purpose" routines that others not working with astronomical data may also find useful. However, many of these procedures call other procedures in the Astronomy User's Library (from Wayne Landsman @GSFC).

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