Re: Newbie needs help...

[Bruce Bowler <bbowler(at)bigelow.org>]

David Fanning wrote:
> 
> Bruce Bowler (bbowler@bigelow.org) writes:
> 
> > I've lurked for a while and now it's time to ask for help...
> 
> Uh, oh. Trouble here. Newbies and de-cloaked lurkers
> always ask the most difficult questions. :-(

It get's worse :-)  I've been programming in THE classical programming
language (FORTRAN roolz!) for more the 2/3's of my life (I'm 45 now, you
do the math :-).  The first machine I ever wrote a program for was the
size of a small bus and had a whopping 16K (yes, that's a K) of memory. 
But let's not start swapping war stories here... 

> > I have some satellite data that I need to a) display a portion of on the
> > globe and b) extract the data at various positions.
>
> What you want to do--slap a lat/lon grid on top of
> an image--is reasonable. It's just that IDL is not
> the software you should be using to do it. :-)
> 
> IDL works the other way around. It allows you to
> slap an image on top of a lat/lon grid. Sometimes
> the result is similar, but if you hold pixel values
> to be sacrosanct, then you are almost always disappointed
> in what you can do with IDL.

I prefer to hold pixels are arm's length (remember, I'm 45 and I've been
staring at CRT's for a good number of those years, my eyesight ain't
what it used to be :-)

I'm willing to try this "thinking outside the box" thing for a while,
but I can't see the box.

Now that I have my image mapped on to a lat/lon grid (see, I'm learning
already :-), how to I access the data by lat/lon?

> if you persist I can recommend "getting used
> to disappointment" as the appropriate spiritual practice.
> 
> Cheers,

Those two sentiments don't seem to go together :-(