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!
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