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What are the most popular packages used to create graphs for astronomy journal papers? Looking at various journals, the styles of the graphs appear to be quite uniform but I can't identify the package(s) that create them.

Friasco
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  • is it LaTeX publishing tool you are after? This is great, but takes a little time to handle properly. – J. Chomel Jul 24 '17 at 08:45
  • Yes, but i'm talking about the graphs that will be inserted into the LaTeX document. (Question clarified.) – Friasco Jul 24 '17 at 09:15
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    Show us an example! Maybe you're looking for GNUPLOT? – J. Chomel Jul 24 '17 at 09:23
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because this has nothing to do with astronomy – Carl Witthoft Jul 24 '17 at 10:44
  • What tools are you using to generate data in the first place? – Carl Witthoft Jul 24 '17 at 10:44
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    @CarlWitthoft -- I disagree slightly, in that it is a question about the practice of astronomy and the technical tools used. (Software is a tool in astronomy almost or just as much as telescopes are.) – Peter Erwin Jul 24 '17 at 11:58
  • @PeterErwin the technical tools used for scientific data analysis are almost 100% topic-agnostic. Further, it's possible to draw any style graph in any software package. It's just a lot easier with the right package, e.g., R- ggplot. – Carl Witthoft Jul 24 '17 at 12:18
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    @CarlWitthoft -- yes, but as a matter of scientific culture and practice, they're not "topic agnostic". SuperMongo, for instance, was created by astronomers and is used almost exclusively by astronomers. IDL originates from a context of atmospheric science, space physics, and astronomy, and has remained popular in those fields, but little used outside them, except perhaps for medical imaging. – Peter Erwin Jul 24 '17 at 13:12
  • @PeterErwin and perhaps one should ask: why is it that R and Python have come to dominate and IDL is fading? It's because you can do all that and more with these two top candidates. – Carl Witthoft Jul 25 '17 at 11:32
  • @CarlWitthoft -- Agreed, plus the fact that both R and Python are open source, while SuperMongo is expensive and IDL is very expensive (certainly one of the motivations driving my shift from IDL to Python...). – Peter Erwin Jul 25 '17 at 11:48

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The most commonly used packages for generating graphics in astronomy are probably

  • IDL -- this has long been the most popular, in part because there is a lot of astronomical data reduction and analysis code written in IDL.

  • SuperMongo

  • The Python package matplotlib

The apparently uniform style you refer to is probably a historical combination of IDL and SuperMongo.

Matplotlib (and other Python packages that act as wrappers around it) is on a trajectory to displace the others; I strongly suspect it is already much more common than SuperMongo, and may be roughly as common as IDL by now.

You will sometimes see figures produced by the PLplot library as output from programs written in Fortran, C/C++, etc. Plots produced using R are also starting to appear.

Peter Erwin
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