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Re: List and Help
--- Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net> wrote:
<snip>
> What should I use to make plots? In general, I want to
> make the
> type of plots that everyone makes to plot sigma vs mag for many
> stars. Also one to plot mag vs time. At the moment I do not have
> IRAF on
> the machine where I am learning to compute. I do have it on another
> machine with CDs as the only method of communicating between the two.
> I
> seem to be able to muddle through installing a program if it is
> compiled. I have never compiled anything.
IRAF will make some specialized plots. Things like ADU value as
a funtion of distance from a star's centriod are just a single
point and click. I gues it will do general purpose plots to
but it is a bit clumsy to use for that purpose
Also most of the UNIX spreadsheet programs will make plots. Simply
highlight two columns and select, say "scatter plot".
But if you are the type of UNIX user to use vi and program in Perl
then you will want to use "gnuplot". It is likely already installed
on your system. Just type "man gnuplot" to read about it.
From the man page:
Plots any number of functions, built up of C operators, C
library functions, and some things C doesn't have like **,
sgn(), etc. Also support for plotting data files, to com
pare actual data to theoretical curves.
You can plot interactively by
typeing commands but most people but the commands in a file and
make edits to the file.
Here is where it gets fun: Write a program in Perl to take some
data, re-format it into a file gnuplot can read and then call
gnuplot with that file.
See http://www.gnuplot.info/ for more than you will ever need to know.
=====
Chris Albertson
Home: 310-376-1029 chrisalbertson90278@yahoo.com
Cell: 310-990-7550
Office: 310-336-5189 Christopher.J.Albertson@aero.org
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