CURSA contains only limited facilities for plotting: there are the applications for generating finding
charts described in Section 18 and both xcatview (see Section 11) and catview (see Section 12) can
plot simple scatter-plots and histograms. For more sophisticated plots it is necessary to export the
columns to be plotted into specialised plotting packages. Both xcatview and catview can generate
output files suitable for input to plotting packages. Usually such files should consist of just the
table of values to be plotted, with no extraneous annotation or formatting. The example in
Section 12.1 and Figure 1 shows how to configure catview to produce such an output
file.
Several plotting packages are available on Starlink. One such is PONGO, which is documented in SUN/137[17]. Figures 5 and 6 show two example PONGO scripts for producing plots. Figure 5 produces a scatter-plot of redshift against magnitude from a table where the magnitude is read from the fifth column and the redshift from the fourth. Figure 6 produces an all-sky plot using a PONGO Aitoff projection. Here the celestial coordinates are read from the second and third columns in the table.
You can use these examples as a basis for your own scripts. They are simple text files prepared with an editor; either type them in ab ovo or paste them from the Latex source for this document, and modify as appropriate.
To run a PONGO script enter the following commands.
icl ICL>’.
load scatter scatter.icl;
substitute the name of your file as appropriate).
scatter exit Alternatively you can use PONGO interactively to assemble the required plot. Many more options are available than are described here. They are fully documented in SUN/137.