astropyvisualization

Astropy visualization, corresponding to the astropy.visualization module, is a subpackage of the Astropy project that provides tools for visually inspecting astronomical data. It supports display of images and spectra, color mapping, normalization, and annotation, and is designed to work seamlessly with Matplotlib and with Astropy data structures, including units and coordinates. It also offers WCS-aware plotting facilities to overlay pixel coordinates with world coordinates via the WCSAxes toolkit.

Core components include image display and normalization, support for overlays and annotations, a collection of perceptually uniform color maps, and utilities for handling different intensity scales through normalization and stretch functions. The colormaps subpackage provides access to standard and custom color maps suitable for astronomical data. The wcsaxes subpackage provides axes objects that understand WCS metadata to label axes with right ascension/declination, wavelength, or velocity, and to draw coordinate grids. The visualization package is designed to be data-agnostic and works with NumPy arrays, FITS data, and other array-like data structures.

Applications encompass quick-look data exploration, the production of publication-quality figures, and pipelines that require consistent visual representations across datasets. It is open source and maintained as part of the Astropy ecosystem, with documentation and tutorials available on the Astropy project website.