Plotting in GWpy (gwpy.plotter)

Visualisation of the data produced by gravitational-wave detectors is obviously a key part of understanding their sensitivity, and studying the potential gravitational-wave signals they record. The gwpy.plotter module provides a number of plot classes, each representing display of a corresponding data type.

Basic plotting

The majority of core data objects in GWpy come with a built-in plot() method, allowing quick display of a single data set, for example:

>>> from gwpy.timeseries import TimeSeries
>>> h1 = TimeSeries.fetch_open_data('H1', 1126259457, 1126259467)
>>> plot = h1.plot()
>>> plot.show()

(png)

../_images/index-1.png

Users can also import the relevant plotting class objects and generate more complicated plots manually:

>>> l1 = TimeSeries.fetch_open_data('L1', 1126259457, 1126259467)
>>> from gwpy.plotter import TimeSeriesPlot
>>> plot = TimeSeriesPlot()
>>> ax = plot.gca()
>>> ax.plot(h1, color='gwpy:ligo-hanford')
>>> ax.plot(l1, color='gwpy:ligo-livingston')
>>> ax.set_ylabel('Strain noise')
>>> plot.show()

(png)

../_images/index-2.png

Plot types

The following diagram displays the available Plot objects and their inheritance from Plot.

Inheritance diagram of core, timeseries, frequencyseries, spectrogram, table, filter

Class reference

A full reference of the above plotting class objects can be found here.