I was introduced to IDL in
1998, and became an avid user and program developer during a very rewarding REU
at the National Solar Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico during the summer of
1999. Since then, I have developed a few fun things and acquired many others,
so I decided to put together this page for those who might be interested. I
apologize for not making all my code immediately accessible, but since much of
it is frequently being changed or updated (or broken) by me, I felt that was
probably a dumb thing to do. However, if something of mine strikes your fancy,
shoot me an email. I love
it when my stuff is found to be useful by someone other than me, so I'll be
glad to hook you up. I can't guarantee any support, though... My thesis
looms, after all...
Things I have written or had a significant hand in developing:
PhotVis: An IDL Photometry Visualization Tool
Developed for the Spitzer GTO Young Stellar Clusters Project, but with general application to many fields of astronomical research, PhotVis is a user-configurable, GUI-based tool for point source detection and aperture photometry. PhotVis utilizes Wayne Landsman's IDL implementation of Peter Stetson's FORTRAN-based DAOPHOT package, merged with several powerful configuration and visualization tools, all accessed by an intuitive graphical user interface. This package not only gives those new to photometry a tool to quickly get them introduced to the field, but also gives the expert powerful automation combined with potent user configurability and real-time results displays to make detailed, consistent, multi-object photometric measurements quickly and easily.
10-6-2003: PhotVis version 1.09 is released, with a whole 3 minor bug fixes and a snazzy new logo by BluSwirl Designs. The logo will probably be redone and/or added to someday, but it's a huge improvement for now.
8-30-2002: PhotVis has reached version 1.08, but the major rehash is
incomplete and I am dissatisfied. The Spitzer
GTO Young Stellar Clusters Project "Pipeline" I've taken it upon myself to "finish" and maintain
the cache of routines we use for reduction of the ground-based near-infrared
images taken to supplement our Spitzer GTO Project. Much of this stuff
was originally written or ported from FORTRAN by Tom Megeath, and modified by
Dawn Peterson. My contribution was to rehash most of it, preserving the
methods, but improving memory efficiency, documenting code, adding several
features, improving general applicability, etc. The current code is in a
mostly finished state, with routines for linearization, mask/bad pixel
detection and management, image combination/filtering, flat fielding,
background subtraction, and mosaicing. All but the mosaicing routines include
use of standard GUI file choosers, with command line circumvention of said GUIs
(for all you purists), and full logging of inputs with log restoration
capabilities to make the inevitable and unenviable task of re-reduction as
painless as possible. 5-12-2004: The ground-based pipeline is reaping several benefits from
the development effort I sunk into my IRAC mosaicker... Specifically,
remosaicking is now a snap, and integrated with that process is my new cosmic
ray flagging and removal module! Several other minor improvements may be
integrated this summer as well, so stay tuned... 2-14-2003: Some significant improvements to the pipeline have been
integrated recently, including: a huge improvement in the sigma-chopped mean
method used in fds_master.pro, borrowing from Mark Buie's avgclip.pro; a big
fix applied to fits_datmask.pro to get rid of reliance on an ancient version of
fits_read.pro; The addition of addmask.pro, which allows one to feed an x,y
position (and optionally a radius, and image header) and get back the mask
vector associated with those locations; plus a bunch of other minor
improvements and tweaks... 7-19-2002: I have designed a full GUI reimplementation of our
mosaicing routines, but it's creation / development has been postponed
indefinitely, due to active PhotVis development, and the need to take some time
to actually use some of this stuff!
A GUI package for aligning, scaling, and creating
three color composite images. Written during my last year at Alfred University,
Threecolor is my first successful IDL GUI package... It's a little rough around
the edges, but does what it does well: make very pretty pictures. 7-19-2002: I have made few changes to Threecolor since graduating from
Alfred in May of 2000, but one of these days I'd love to make a Threecolor 2.0
with all that I've learned since then... Who knows? Someday I might find the
time to do it!
Other people's things I've experienced and/or use frequently:
The IDL Astronomy
User's Library Indispensible! A collection of fundamental
astronomy programs brought together and maintained by (and in many cases written
by) Wayne Landsman of Goddard Space Flight Center. Nearly all my programs rely
on this package. There's also a huge collection of links off of the main page
to other IDL sources that are out there.
ATV: An Interactive
Display Tool for IDL Aaron Barth's sweet, insanely featured FITS image
viewer, modelled after SAOImage. I owe fealty to this package, as I modelled
several features in PhotVis to imitate it... In fact, the original plan was to
simply integrate the DAOPHOT routines into ATV, but it was too big for me to
deal with, and thus PhotVis was born.
Marc Buie of Lowell Observatory has a very broad
library as well. I used CCDPHOT and ITOOL (both of which influenced PhotVis as
well!) as an undergrad at Alfred, and they were both solid. There's a ton of
great general purpose astronomy programs too!
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Gutermuth