This is supposed to become a collection of tools, tips and tricks that I find useful for my astronomical research.
IDL-related stuff
IDL is the Integrated Data Language. It is widely used in all kinds of sciences, e.g. in astronomy, to turn measured raw-data into scientifically meaningful results.
- Very helpful, if you are working with IDL, is the extension TeXtoIDL that allows you to enter symbols using the well-known LaTeX syntax. For example, the call
print, textoidl('\lambda [\mu m]')results in!7k!X [!7l!X m] - If you are using IDL and are working with a Mac you might find this useful: A syntax-coloring plug-in for TextWrangler, the free (light) version of the BBEdit text editor
Python-related stuff
If you can, avoid using IDL (for various reasons) and start with a modern, open-source scripting language like Python. You will probably want to use Numpy, Scipy and Matplolib if you want to use it for astronomical purposes
In switching from IDL to Python comparisons between Python and IDL commands can be helpful. One that I didn’t find in there is the IDL “plots” command. matplotlib in Python doesn’t seem to allow to plot points, but you can make your single coordinate point to a 1-element array and then matplotlib will plot it just as fine. This can be necessary when you want to plot points with different colors.
Bibliography management
A good combination is BibDesk + Skim. BibDesk allows you to sort papers by keyword in a bibtex file that you can use as a reference file for LaTeX documents. With Skim you can read and annotate PDFs in an easy way. With the appropriate template, BibDesk will even show your Skim notes in a preview pane. And just recently I found a very helpful Automator script / Mac OS X Snow Leopard Service that will take an ADS or astro-ph reference (as a URL or just an identifying bit of text), download the linked paper and create a new reference in BibDesk for you.