The Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA Survey

📁 This is an archived page from the original ALFALFA Survey website. Return to the ALFALFA Legacy Homepage.

Arecibo Observatory

An Introduction to using IDL for ALFALFA

The best way to learn IDL is to get hold of the book "Practical IDL Programming" by Liam E. Gumley (Morgan Kauffman Publishers) and devour it! That's how most of us learned.

Use the IDL Development Environment (IDLDE) for writing programs. In a terminal where you are positioned in the directory where you will also run IDL, type
> idlde &
and the environment window will pop up. You can then start IDL as usual.

Here are some links to tutorials which can help you practice with IDL.

The GSFC IDL Astronomy User's Library
Links to more Astronomy IDL websites
Carl Heiles' tutorials on IDL and Unix, from Berkeley. Carl also has some other info on map projections.
UMontana IDL intro
UFlorida IDL course Check out this one!
IDL tutorial from Center for Scientific Computing and Visualization at BU.
IDL tutorial from U Minnesota.
IDL tutorial from U Va.
Download "Getting Started" manual (PDF) from Research Systems
Mark Fanning's page
The ALFALFA data are reduced and analyzed using software we have developed in the IDL environment; we call this package "LOVEDATA", because you should "love your data". Current documents and instructions on reducing ALFALFA data in IDL are found at the ALFALFA Team website. Ask your local advisor for the required login information.

Back to the ALFA for ALFALFA page

Last modified: Sat Feb 9 08:52:43 EST 2008 by martha