Making Journal-Ready Plots

• Image Aspect Ratio: The default box in which maps are plotted is typically landscape mode; i.e. the shape of the window. This distorts the map and is not acceptable for publication. A square map can be set as such with set box square, or the aspect ratio can be computed automatically using set box match.
• Line thickness: The default pen weight is too light to endure the image shrinking that occurs on the journal's printe page. Thusly, it is advisable to increase the thickness of the pen. For example, to double the pen thickness pen /weight 2.
• Axis labels: X and Y axes need to be labeled, and additional text may be needed to label color wedges, etc. Axis labels may be added like this:

  
            label "Offset RA ('')" /x
            label "Offset Dec ('')" /y 
        

  Additional text can be added using the draw text command, although it is perhaps easier to do this interactively: type draw, move the cursor to the place where the text is to go, and hit t and enter the text. Hit e to exit the drawing mode. For more help on the draw command, help draw.
• Additional Annotations: It is customary to draw the beam size and shape on the plot, for reference. This can be done with the ellipse command. For example, the following example puts a 22" filled ellipse at the (-75",330") offset in the rho Oph map from the OTF mapping section.

        ellipse 0.000052 /user -75 330 seconds /fill 0      
        

After the following details have been attended to, the HCO⁺ J=4-3 map of the rho Oph A cloud core now looks like this:

Plotting of single spectral scans in CLASS is not polished enough (IMHO) for publishable plots, so it is not uncommon to export the desired spectrum in FITS format, where other packages can be used to plot it (like IDL, Perl/PDL/PGPLOT, etc...). Let's explore this in the next section.

Randomly-Sampled OTF Maps

Reduction Home

Exporting Data