This is the repo for the PyLunch astroplotlib sprint on 11/09/12.

The astroplotlib project lives here: astroplotlib.stsci.edu

This repo contains the code for generating the plots on the website. The data for the plots can be found here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/q44tw4y8k6qun66/hLRF872umr.

Import matplotlib via import matplotlib.pyplot as plt.

Use the subplots function to create Figure and Axes objects at the beginning of your example. For a figure with one axes:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

Or a figure with two axes:

fig, (ax1, ax2) = plt.subplots(1, 2)

Save figures as PDF.

For reading txt files use NumPy's [loadtxt] (http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.loadtxt.html#numpy.loadtxt) or [genfromtxt] (http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.genfromtxt.html#numpy.genfromtxt) when possible.

Fits data should of course be read by pyfits.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x_data, y_data = np.loadtxt('data.txt', unpack=True)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

ax.plot(x_data, y_data)

fig.savefig('plot.pdf')