Description
You have a pile of spacecraft observations in CDF, HDF5, FITS and CEF, and looking at one interval of magnetic-field data means writing Python to read the files, align the time axis and draw a plot — then rerunning the lot when you change the time range. Autoplot collapses that into an address bar: paste the data source's URI and the plot appears, with the time range as a parameter you edit and press Enter on.
It is the tool the US space-physics data centres actually use — NASA's virtual observatories, PDS-PPI, the Iowa plasma wave group — so cdaweb, das2server and pdsppi services are first-class sources and nothing has to be downloaded first. The canvas splits into linked panels, the time axes zoom together, and a Jython console on the side turns whatever you worked out interactively into a script you can run again.
The URI is the data source: type a vap, cdaweb, das2server or pdsppi URI — or a local path — with the time range and columns as parameters, and it plots; the URI history brings any earlier query straight back.
The formats research actually uses: CDF, HDF5, FITS, NetCDF, CEF, QDS, Excel and awkward ASCII tables load directly, with no per-format parser to write.
Linked panels: split the canvas into several plots whose time axes bind together, so dragging or zooming one moves the rest — which is how you compare instruments over the same interval.
Spectrograms beside line plots: lines, filled areas, scatter and spectrograms share one canvas, with colour scale, axis range and render type set per plot on the side panel.
Jython scripting built in: the script window reaches Autoplot's own data model to load, rebin, difference and annotate, so an exploratory session becomes a repeatable script.
Digitize scanned figures: the digitizer panel treats a scanned plot from an old paper as a data source and traces points along its curves back into numbers, instead of reading values off gridlines by hand.
Java, so it travels: one build runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, which matters when the lab machine is not the one you started on.
It is the tool the US space-physics data centres actually use — NASA's virtual observatories, PDS-PPI, the Iowa plasma wave group — so cdaweb, das2server and pdsppi services are first-class sources and nothing has to be downloaded first. The canvas splits into linked panels, the time axes zoom together, and a Jython console on the side turns whatever you worked out interactively into a script you can run again.
Features
The URI is the data source: type a vap, cdaweb, das2server or pdsppi URI — or a local path — with the time range and columns as parameters, and it plots; the URI history brings any earlier query straight back.
The formats research actually uses: CDF, HDF5, FITS, NetCDF, CEF, QDS, Excel and awkward ASCII tables load directly, with no per-format parser to write.
Linked panels: split the canvas into several plots whose time axes bind together, so dragging or zooming one moves the rest — which is how you compare instruments over the same interval.
Spectrograms beside line plots: lines, filled areas, scatter and spectrograms share one canvas, with colour scale, axis range and render type set per plot on the side panel.
Jython scripting built in: the script window reaches Autoplot's own data model to load, rebin, difference and annotate, so an exploratory session becomes a repeatable script.
Digitize scanned figures: the digitizer panel treats a scanned plot from an old paper as a data source and traces points along its curves back into numbers, instead of reading values off gridlines by hand.
Java, so it travels: one build runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, which matters when the lab machine is not the one you started on.
