Visualization

Spectral-cube is not primarily a visualization package, but it has several tools for visualizing subsets of the data.

All lower-dimensional subsets, OneDSpectrum, and Projection, have their own quicklook methods (quicklook and quicklook, respectively). These methods will plot the data with somewhat properly labeled axes.

The two-dimensional viewers default to using aplpy. Because of quirks of how aplpy sets up its plotting window, these methods will create their own figures. If use_aplpy is set to False, and similarly if you use the OneDSpectrum quicklook, the data will be overplotted in the latest used plot window.

In principle, one can also simply plot the data. For example, if you have a cube, you could do:

>>> plt.plot(cube[:,0,0]) 

to plot a spectrum sliced out of the cube or:

>>> plt.imshow(cube[0,:,:]) 

to plot an image slice.

Warning

There are known incompatibilities with the above plotting approach: matplotlib versions <2.1 will crash, and you will have to clear the plot window to reset it.

Other Visualization Tools

To visualize the cubes directly, you can use some of the other tools we provide for pushing cube data into external viewers.

See Visualizing spectral cubes with yt for using yt as a visualization tool.

The spectral_cube.SpectralCube.to_glue and spectral_cube.SpectralCube.to_ds9 methods will send the whole cube to glue and ds9. This approach generally requires loading the whole cube into memory.