Installation

The latest Lightning release can be installed as source from our GitHub page via git:

cd <install_dir>
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/rafaeleufrasio/lightning

Note

Lightning is written in the Interactive Data Language (IDL) and requires IDL version 8.3 or later. It additionally requires the IDL Astronomy User’s Library, the IDL Coyote Library, and Craig Markwardt’s MPFIT library. All three will need to be installed and added to your IDL path before using Lightning.

Before running Lightning, you will need to build the package using:

cd <install_dir>/lightning
idl lightning_build

This creates a .sav file in the Lightning base directory containing all the compiled routines you need to run Lightning. Then, at the beginning of an IDL session where you want to run Lightning, you should do:

IDL> restore, !lightning_dir+'lightning.sav'

Or, you can add the above line of code to your IDL startup file.

Note

We recommend adding this line of code to your startup file. If you do not already have one, a startup file will be automatically generated when building Lightning. The file will be named startup.pro, and it will be located in the current user’s .idl directory in the home directory.