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VisualAstro

VisualAstro is an astrophysical visualization system with functions for easy visualization and manipulation of astronomical data. The package aims to make publication-ready plots with minimal commands and no LaTeX installation.

Features

• Unified interface for Matplotlib, Astropy, NumPy, spectral-cube, specutils, and other astronomy packages
• Mathtext and scientific stylesheets without LaTeX installation as well as many other styles for publication-quality figures
• Colorblind safe alternative colorsets, and colormaps
• User-friendly interface with many convenience methods that integrate with Matplotlib and other packages

Installation

See the Installation Guide on the documentation site for detailed instruction on how to install VisualAstro.

VisualAstro can be installed with any Python version >=3.11. However, due to the eMudhra root certificate issue, we recommend using one of the following versions: 3.15.2, 3.14.10, 3.13.18, 3.12.16, or 3.11.18.

Documentation

Check out the documentation page! Check out the examples folder for notebook tutorials!

Dependencies

VisualAstro requires:

astropy, matplotlib, numpy, and scipy.

Optional dependencies

Optionally, some functionalities of VisualAstro require:

• Image Data: regions, reproject
• Cube Data: spectral-cube
• Spectra: specutils, dust_extinction
• Extra Stylesheets: scienceplots
• Color Utilities: cmasher, colorspacious, tol-colors
• Progress Bar: tqdm

If you try to use functionalities that require an optionally dependent package but do not have that package installed, VisualAstro will raise an ImportError and prompt you to install that package.

Examples

Example colorsets:

Example fontstyles:

Citing VisualAstro

If you use VisualAstro for your research, we ask that you please cite the Zenodo record below. The developers of VisualAstro would like to thank you for acknowledging our work!

BibTeX:

@software{visualastro,
  author       = {Gerville-Reache, Elko and
                  Tian, Qiushi Chris and
                  Whitmer, Audrey},
  title        = {VisualAstro},
  month        = oct,
  year         = 2026,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v0.3.2},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.23827878},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23827878},
}

Credits

Fonts

VisualAstro includes multiple mathtext fonts:

Concrete Math, distributed under the SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE from a release by:

author = Daniel Flipo
year = 2022-2026
url = https://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/concmath-otf?lang=en

Libertinus Math, distributed under the SIL OPEN FONT LICENSE from a release by:

authors = Caleb Maclennan, Libertinus Project Authors
year = 2012-2024
url = https://github.com/alerque/libertinus V7.051

New Computer Modern, distributed under the GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE from a release by:

author = Antonis Tsolomitis
location = Samos, Greece
year = 2019--2026
url = https://ctan.org/texarchive/fonts/newcomputermodern?lang=en

AVHershey TrueType, distributed under the MIT License from a release by:

@software{jiaxuan_li_2023_8126529,
  author       = {Jiaxuan Li},
  title        = {AstroJacobLi/smplotlib: v0.0.9},
  month        = jul,
  year         = 2023,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v0.0.9},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.8126529},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8126529},
}