There are currently no openings for supported research in the group, however future possibilities may become available for talented and motivated students.
Students interested in doing research with our group will benefit greatly from background in these areas:
Familiarity with the Mac OS X and UNIX (Linux/BSD) Operating Systems
This includes knowledge of simple unix commands, shell commands and wildcards (such as ">, >>, *, ?, [0-9], ), and the all important .cshrc file.
A short primer on UNIX by Carl Heiles
University of Indiana Introduction to Unix Commands
Advanced Unix Commands from the University of Illinois at Chicago
Programming Experience, Especially with the Interactive Data Language (IDL)
Our group uses IDL for all of our research projects. If you not familiar with IDL, it is strongly recommended that you download it from the ITT Website to use in demo mode for free, or purchase a student edition which costs about the price of an average textbook. Some useful sites for help with IDL along with some of the procedures used by our group are listed below.
- Programming IDL for Astronomy (M. Perrin) a Very good introduction to IDL with important philosophy too! (pdf)
- The following 4 PS files (also from C. Hiles, UCB Astro) give you a good introduction to IDL 1.) Basics 2.) Data Types, Including Structures 3.) Plotting 4.) Color
- IDL help page written by Eric Williams, former SFSU student and planetsearcher
- D. Fanning's IDL tips and tricks
- IDL Astronomy Library
- C. Markwardt's IDL library
Here are two example programs which demonstrate the syntax of IDL:
Astronomy Knowledge
- General astronomy knowledge, such as you will learn in Astro 115, and lower and upper division astronomy classes at SFSU.
- Information on Extrasolar Planet Research. Visit our Links page for links to outside sources of information on exoplanets.
- Familiarity with On-Line Astronomy Resources including ADS, Astro-Ph research paper site. Simbad Star Database.
