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Chapter 2: Skymap Subclasses

In this chapter we introduce the subclasses of cartosky.Skymap and explore some of their features for astronomical plotting.

We start by importing several classes from cartosky and setting a few constants that we will use in this example.

In the last tutorial we saw how we could create skymaps with different projections using the projection keyword argument to the Skymap initializer. However, for ease of use we have also defined a set of subclasses for commonly used projections.

In addition to facilitating the generation of specific projections, Skymap also has a number of astronomically oriented methods. For example, you can draw an outline of the Milky Way

In addition to methods to plot astronomical objects, Skymap has a number of methods to plot useful quantities when observing. (Careful, the 'cyl' projection can be a bit weird when the tissot used to plot the airmass crosses lon=0.)

In addition to the projection subclasses of Skymap, there are also survey-specific subclasses. The SurveySkymap object has a number of methods for plotting individual surveys.

Many surveys don't span the entire sky and it is useful to zoom in on the region specifically covered. To do this, we use the SurveyZoom subclasses.

Unfortunately, the ZoomSkymap is rather fragile because it relies on an AxisArtist to plot the curvilinear coordinate grid. Hopefully we can make it more robust in the future.

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