Tag Archives: Object Graphics

Solar wind visualization at NOAA SWPC

Posted on March 14, 2013 by

George Millward and his colleagues at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) use IDL, among other tools, to study, monitor and forecast solar events that impact GPS, power grids and communications networks on Earth. On the WSA-Enlil Solar Wind … Continue reading →

Posted in visualization | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Using a hash as a widget state variable

Posted on March 8, 2012 by

The design pattern of a state variable in (procedural) IDL widget programming is used to communicate information from a widget creation routine to event handlers and other helpers. A state variable is typically implemented as a structure or as a … Continue reading →

Posted in language, programming | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

A cool visualization with Object Graphics

Posted on October 13, 2011 by

Peter Delamere, a research associate at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at CU-Boulder, made this visualization of plasma flow around Io, with Jupiter in the background, using IDL Object Graphics: Here’s Dr. Delamere’s description of the visualization: … Continue reading →

Posted in visualization | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Implicit Get/SetProperty calls in user-defined classes

Posted on October 6, 2011 by

Operator overloading in user-defined classes was introduced in IDL 8 through the IDL_Object class. Mike Galloy explains how to use this technique here. One somewhat overlooked feature of IDL_Object is that it allows implicit calls to the GetProperty and SetProperty … Continue reading →

Posted in language, programming | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments