Exoplanet Research at San Francisco State University

Extrasolar Planet Research at San Francisco State University

There are currently five graduate students, 2 two undergrads, and one postdoc working in Dr. Fischer's group. There are not currently any openings for supported research in the group, however future possiblilities may become available for talented and motivated students

Students doing research in our group will benefit greatly from background skills in these areas:

Familiarity with the UNIX (Linux/BSD) operating system

This includes knowledge of simple unix commands, shell commands and wildcards (such as ">, >>, *, ?, [0-9], ), and the all important .cshrc file.

More UNIX help can be found here and here. Please also see unix.ps from UC Berkeley's Undergraduate Lab

Useful programs: xv for viewing images. StarOffice program (command: soffice), a wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentation software, etc.

Programming experience, especially with Interactive Data Language (IDL)

Here's some help:

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
Making an IDL graph into a JPG (JPEG) file (N. Bozorgnia)
Here are two example programs which demonstrate the syntax of IDL.
example.pro
ex2.pro

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. See Exoplanets.Org, and also Extrasolar Planets Encyclopeadia
Familiarity with On-Line Astronomy Resources including ADS, Astro-Ph research paper site. Simbad Star Database