PHYS-4007/5007 Course Project #1 Web Home Page

Your Computer Class Project will involve writing an IDL computer code dealing with data fitting and analysis. This web site has been set up to assist you in this project. It contains spectra of a set of galaxies (in ASCII format with files ending in ".txt"), a bare-bones IDL procedure that you can use as a starting point, some supplemental IDL procedures, the spectral data files, a reference paper concerning the spectra, and sample LaTeX files to assist you in writing your manuscript for this project. For this project, you will be determining Hubble's Constant, H_o, which is used in Hubble's Law:

The Computer Project #1 Instruction Packet (which can be downloaded below) contains a short description of Hubble's Law, information on what you need to figure out in your program, the techniques and IDL functions and procedures you may need, and an outline on how you should format your manuscript. Those of you taking this course for honors or graduate credit will be expected to carry out additional analysis as will be described in the Instruction Packet.

Your code must be capable of producing plots to both the terminal and to a hardcopy file such as postscript or bitmap (IDL is capable of producing both kinds of output). Note that you do not need to include GUI software for this project, a simple IDL plot window will be good enough.

In summary, you will need to write an IDL procedure (or multiple procedures and functions) that carried out the steps described in the Instruction Packet in figuring out Hubble's constant. I have included a "driver" procedure (see the link hubble.pro below) that will help you design the software to carry out this project. Once again, honors and graduate students note the additional "honors and graduate only" sections listed in the Instruction Packet.

A full description of the project is given in the compproj1 files. The ".tex" file contains the LaTeX file of the write-up for this project, which has been compiled into the output ".pdf" (PDF) file. A sample LaTeX file (template.tex) can be downloaded and used as a template for your project's manuscript (the printable output files are stored in the associated PDF files). This LaTeX file requires either the temptex.eps figure file (if compiling in Unix) or the temptex.bmp image file (if compiling with PCTeX in Microsoft Windows) to be downloaded too. The template.pdf file contain the compiled versions of this LaTeX file. Download the following files to a subdirectory where you wish to carry out this project (i.e. the so-called working directory). Double click on each of the files listed.

Note that the IDL procedure is written under IDL Version 4.0. It has been tested under Version 5.6 (which is on the Linux workstation) and Version 5.2 (which is on the PCs in BH 264) and work fine in these environments. Should you be using any version of IDL earlier than V5.2, you will need to contact me for copies of the "DIALOG" procedures which were added to IDL in Version 5.2. I have V4.0 versions of these functions.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to OIT's paranoia about security issues, files ending in either ".dat" (standard Unix data files) and ".pro" (IDL procedure and function files) will not show up on a web browser even though those files exist on the web server disk. To counteract this, I have changed the name of all ".dat" files to ".txt" files and renamed all of the IDL procedures for you to download to ".txt" file names. Note that after you download a given IDL procedure or function file from this web site to your IDL working directory on your PC, immediately rename it to its ".pro" name as shown on web page link. For instance, when you click on "workdir.pro", this will save this file to your IDL working directory as "workdir.txt". Once on your home machine, rename it to "workdir.pro".