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You would be surprised at the number of Excel plots in the literature. Most astrophysicists use IDL or IRAF, I've never seen anyone use Matlab. The benefits ar
by joshvm 11y ago
You would be surprised at the number of Excel plots in the literature.
Most astrophysicists use IDL or IRAF, I've never seen anyone use Matlab. The benefits are tons of functions specifically tailored for astro data analysis. Python is gathering momentum though, there are libraries like sunpy and astropy. Plenty of IDL fanatics are floored when you can show them just how easy it is to process data with the Numpy stack.
I'm _not_ an astrophysicist, but I work with a lot of them. I use Jupyter notebook daily. It's the perfect balance between REPL python and standalone scripts. My typical workflow is to hack something together in a notebook, which lets you iterate very quickly, then once I'm happy I freeze the code into a module.
- gaur 11y agoHaha, I forgot about IDL. My very first coding project as an undergrad was in IDL, until one day a new grad student showed up to the lab and said, "WTF? Do this in python." When looking at plots in papers, there are always little giveaways for what program it was made in. Plot has horizontal gridlines, but no vertical gridlines: Excel. Plot is typeset with Arial, size 4: Matlab. Plot looks like it was sent through a fax a few times: IDL.
- cdelsolar 11y agoDid the LIGO paper use matplotlib? I thought it did but that would be too cool.
- whorleater 11y agoI'm an astrophysics/CS student, and IDL has been on life support at my university for the last 3 years. Everything is either done through Fortran 90 or C/C++ for simulations code, and the data processing is done through Python with some combination of GNUplot/matplotlib/yt, or maybe R.
- joshvm 11y agoOh good God how could I forget about Fortran and GNUplot. F90 though? Luxury. All your code should be in F77 :P . I've worked on a few image reduction pipelines which were all in C++.
- archgoon 11y agoMatlab was used a ton by my schools (UCSC) Robotics and Signals Processing groups. Simulink seemed to be the killer app there.
- SpaceManNabs 11y agoUndergrad astrophysics student here. The research classes at my institution are all taught in python. I am writing my senior thesis in python, and my advisor and his grad student do most of their work in c++ + python.
- yk 11y agoIDL is not that bad, assuming that you really understood when it generates an implicit loop and that int is just 16bit. (And double check, I wrote a few scripts that happily read the first 32000 lines of a file multiple times...)