What I’ve done so far is followed APOGEE data tutorial found here. This was a very helpful introduction to the data format. It has made it easy to know what to search for instead of being lost.

The rest of my time has been getting the environment for apogee python package by Jo Bovy up and running (took a awhile but I have it now). They were mostly issues with being new to the Unix environment and not very experienced in python.  But it’s speeding up now after these growing pains.

These problems were not having a fortran compiler, wget, and setting permanent environment variables (still can’t, just using temporary ones right now).

I can now easily plot great looking spectra like shown in the README of apogee.

The next step for me now is to start getting the FERRE modeling up.