Welcome to mw-plot’s documentation!
mw-plot is a handy Python package for plotting face-on and all-sky maps of the Milky Way using matplotlib (https://matplotlib.org/) for
static plots and bokeh (https://bokeh.org/) for interactive plots.
You can set the center and radius of the plot anywhere on a milkyway galaxy image with galactic or galactocentric coordinates.
Detailed documentation is available at https://milkyway-plot.readthedocs.io/
No acknowledgement to mw_plot is required if you generate plots for your non-commerical publication, but you must acknowledgement the origin of
the background images. The relevant reference text can by obtained by the property citation of a mw_plot class instance.
For example, to get the citation text for the background image of a face-on Milky Way plot:
>>> from mw_plot import MWFaceOn
>>> mw = MWFaceOn()
>>> mw.citation
'NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech)'
or for the background infrared image of an all-sky Milky Way plot:
>>> from mw_plot import MWSkyMap
>>> mw = MWSkyMap()
>>> mw.citation
'ESA/Gaia/DPAC'
Install
To install via pip
python -m pip install mw_plot
If something is not working properly, try to upgrade first and then report it as an issue on Github if the problem persists
python -m pip install mw_plot --upgrade
You can also clone the latest commit of mw_plot from Github by running the following command to install the package in editable mode
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/henrysky/milkyway_plot.git
python -m pip install -e .
System Requirement
mw-plot requires Python 3.8 or above. The following packages are required which will be installed automatically when you install mw_plot:
astropy
astroquery
matplotlib>3.7.0
numpy
pandas
requests
Getting Started
Matplotlib backend