AVM tagging

The latest developer version of APLpy has support for reading/writing AVM tags from/to RGB images (via PyAVM). To make a plot with an AVM-tagged RGB image, say ‘example.jpg’, you can use:

import aplpy
f = aplpy.FITSFigure('example.jpg')
f.show_rgb()

Note that no filename is required for show_rgb() in this case.

If PyAVM is installed, make_rgb_image() can embed AVM meta-data into RGB images it creates, although only JPEG and PNG files support this:

import aplpy
aplpy.make_rgb_image('2mass_cube.fits', '2mass_rgb.jpg')

If PyAVM 0.9.1 or later is installed, the above file 2mass_rgb.jpg will include AVM meta-data and can then be plotted with:

import aplpy
f = aplpy.FITSFigure('2mass_rgb.jpg')
f.show_rgb()

In other words, this means that when creating an RGB image with APLpy, it is no longer necessary to initialize FITSFigure with a FITS file and then use show_rgb() with the RGB image filename - instead, FITSFigure can be directly initialized with the AVM-tagged image.

To disable the embedding of AVM tags, you can use the embed_avm_tags=False option for make_rgb_image().

These features require PyAVM 0.9.1 or later. Please report any issues you encounter here.