APLpy is here!
APLpy (the Astronomical Plotting Library in Python) is a Python module aimed at producing publication-quality plots of astronomical imaging data in FITS format. The module uses Matplotlib, a powerful and interactive plotting package. It is capable of creating output files in several graphical formats, including EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG.
Main features
- Make plots interactively or using scripts
- Show grayscale, colorscale, and 3-color RGB images of FITS files
- Generate co-aligned FITS cubes to make 3-color RGB images
- Overlay any number of contour sets
- Overlay markers with fully customizable symbols
- Plot customizable shapes like circles, ellipses, and rectangles
- Overlay coordinate grids
- Customize the appearance of labels and ticks
- Hide, show, and remove different contour and marker layers
- Pan, zoom, and save any view as a full publication-quality plot
- Save plots as EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG
A list of planned features is available on our Trac page. If there are any features that you would like to see implemented that do not appear in this list, just email us here or leave a request in the Feature Requests forum.
Getting Started
Want to get started? Then download the package through Sourceforge. Follow the installation instructions in the downloaded folder and you should be set to use APLpy. Check out the Tutorial page on how to make some beautiful and simple plots. If you want to see the latest features added to APLpy then read the current release notes.
Reporting problems
If you run into problems with APLpy, drop us an email here or leave a bug report in the Bug Reporting forum.
Source code
If you're gutsy and know what you're doing with Python you can download the bleeding-edge source code via Subversion.
svn co https://aplpy.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/aplpy aplpy
If you want to explore the the source code online, click on the Trac button on the right.