IDL

IDL, short for Interactive Data Language, is a programming language used for data analysis. It is popular in particular areas of science, such as astronomy, atmospheric physics and medical imaging

Installation

Ask in your institute to install it and to get a license since IDL is a paid programming language. Once you have it, in your home directory, check your .zlogin file to see if you have defined the following variables: IDL_DIR and IDL_PATH. In case of using Mac and tcsh, you should have something like this:

export IDL_PATH="/Applications/exelis/idl85/bin"
export IDL_DIR="/Applications/exelis/idl85/"

including the IDL_PATH in your PATH:

export PATH=$PATH":"$IDL_PATH

SSWIDL

SolarSoft is a set of integrated software libraries, data bases, and system utilities which provide a common programming and data analysi\ s environment for Solar Physics. It is primarily an IDL based system, although some instrument teams integrate executables written in oth\ er languages.

Installation

SSWIDL can be only used in csh/tcsh terminals, but we can configurate our terminal to launch without having to switch (see below). To install it, follow these instructions: SSWIDL_INSTALL. Choose, e.g., the following packages to install: chianti ontology aia iris hmi

Terminal configuration

Once installed, configurate your csh/tcsh terminal to use SSWIDL. In your home directory, in the .login file you need to define the system variable SSW as the location of your SSW installation, e.g.:

setenv SSW "/Users/yourname/ssw"

Then you need to define the SSW_INSTR with the list of instruments you have included in the installation.

setenv SSW_INSTR "chianti ontology aia iris hmi"

Finally, add the following line in your .login file:

source $SSW/gen/setup/setup.ssw /quiet

Once you have everything ready, in case you use zsh, you can define the following alias in your .zlogin (or .zshrc) file: 

alias sswidl='tcsh -c "sswidl"'
This way you will be able to launch it without switching manually to tsch.

DNSPRO

DNSPRO is a package of IDL routines developed by Daniel Nóbrega Siverio to visualize Bifrost simulations. So far, it depends on IDL routines of Bifrost, so you need to clone Bifrost. In addition to Bifrost visualization routines, now it includes basic routines for SST observations developed by Luc Rouppe van der Voort.

Installation

You can clone the repository through HTTPS like this:

git clone https://username@github.com/dnobrega/DNS.git

replacing "username" with your github username.

To use the package, it is necessary to modify your .login file in your home directory to add the following system variables. In case of working with zsh:

export DNS="/folder/DNS"

where folder is in this case the location where you have cloned the DNS package.

Then you need to add DNS path to the IDL_PATH. You should have something like this in case of using tcsh and Mac:

export IDL_PATH="/Applications/exelis/idl85/bin"":+"$BIFROST_IDL":+"$DNS

Finally, you need to define a variable called DNS_PROJECTS with the default location where you want to save the plots and movies you are going to create with the DNS package, e.g.,

export DNS_PROJECTS="~/dns_plots"

and create that folder. Within DNS_PROJECTS, new folders will be automatically created with the name of the simulation when you save images or movies related to that simulation.

Usage examples for Bifrost runs

Within a folder with a Bifrost experiment, run SSWIDL. The first plot we are going to create is a density plot:

dns_plot, "r",snapt=0
where you have to modify snapt variable with the number of snapshot you want to plot. In case of a 3D run, by default it will show the "XZ" plane along the whole Y-direction. You can modify which slices you want to show, e.g.,

dns_plot, "r",snapt=0, iy0=10, iyf=100, iystep=2
will show from index 10 to index 100 in Y-direction each two indexes. In case you want a specific slice in Y-direction, use iyt, e..g,

dns_plot, "r",snapt=0, iyt=300, /png
In this case we have also added the png flag to save the image as a .png file in DNS_PROJECTS folder.

You can also plot animations moving in time as follows:

dns_plot, "r",snap0=0, snapf=500, step=10, iyt=300

That will show the XZ plane of the simulation in the index 300 of the Y-direction from snapshot 0 to snapshot 500 each 10 snapshots.

You can save the previous animation, writing

dns_plot, "r",snap0=0, snapf=500, step=10, iyt=300, /movie, /setplot

That will create a movie in your DNS_PROJECTS folder. The setplot flag is to create the movie using the Z buffer device.

In 3D experiments you can plot different planes, for example,

dns_plot, "r",snapt=100, dim="yz", ixstep=10
which will show the YZ plane each 10 indexes in X-direction. You can do the same for XY,

dns_plot, "r",snapt=100, dim="xy", izstep=10

You can customize your window size, thickness, colors, position of the plot... For instance,

dns_plot, "r",snapt=100, dim="xy", xsize=1200, ysize=600, position=[0.14,0.08, 0.92, 0.74]

Once you are happy with your plot setup, you can save it, so you will not need to write all the commands again. To do that, use

dns_plot, "r",snapt=100, dim="xy", xsize=1200, ysize=600, position=[0.14,0.08, 0.92, 0.74], /save_dns_confi
That will create a file in your current directory called dns_confi.sav with the plot parameters you have defined.

Usage examples for SST obs

Within a folder with reduced SST observations, run SSWIDL.

Then create a string list with the names of the cube files within that folder. To that end, type 

fcube, f

That will give you an array f of files that can be fcubes (floating-point cubes) or icubes (integer cubes).

The following step is, e.g., to read the first cube of the list by writting 

cube=lp_read(f(0),header=header)

You can also run a CRISPEX session by doing the following. Let's assume your list contains the following files: 

 0 nb_6563_08:05:00_aligned_3950_2017-05-25T08:07:37.icube
 1 nb_6563_08:05:00_aligned_3950_2017-05-25T08:07:37_sp.icube
 2 hmimag_2017-05-25T08:07:37_aligned_3950_2017-05-25T08:07:37.fcube
so, 
crispex, f[0], f[1], refcube=f[2]
will start a CRISPEX session using the Halpha data together with an HMI magnetogram as reference. Please remind that the first file has to be an image file and the second file has to be a sp (spectral) file. They are actually the same array, but ordered differently.