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Hopefully I'm in the appropriate section as my question is mainly about coding, but it's for astronomy.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how I can take a range of MJD values and convert them into number of days elapsed so I can normalize a plot of two supernova and their absolute magnitudes over time in IDL. Is there a simple conversion for this I'm not seeing or do I need to tediously convert every value to determine the number of days to use for my x-axis?

Note: I do not wish to convert to the date, but the actually number of days elapsed as to normalize my two plots for comparison.

Thanks!

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  • $\begingroup$ Since MJD is a simple number of days, can't you just do days_elapsed = mjd2 - mjd1 (or whatever the syntax is for idl). This might be a better fit for StackOverflow. $\endgroup$ – James K Sep 25 '16 at 18:16
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Like @James K said, the MJD is simply a count, so you can set some arbitrary date to be 0 and go from there.

For example, take today's MJD date and say there was one event today:

Today = 57657

Add three months and 12 days to the next event:

Today + 103 = 57760

So if you called ten days before the first event 0, then the "dates" of the first two events would simply be the following:

Start = Event_1 - 10 = 0 
Event_1 = Start + 10 = 10 <-- Semantics right!
Event_2 = Event_1 + 103 = 113

It really is that simple. Just set a variable to equal whatever starting MJD you want to be zero and count earth days between events.

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