astropy / astropy/astropy

Add public API for WCSAxes to retrieve the tick locations and labels on each axis

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#16,464 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
API change Feature Request needs-discussion visualization.wcsaxes
Dominant language
Python
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Description

I am interested in being able to plot world coordinates in non-Matplotlib viewers, for example in bqplot. However, I would prefer to not have to re-implement all of WCSAxes in bqplot, and an alternative would be to internally store a WCSAxes instance and set limits on it, then query it for tick locations and labels. However, I don't think we have a proper way at the moment to get this - and:

```python
ax.xaxis.get_ticklocs()
ax.yaxis.get_ticklabels()
```

is not correct because it is what the ticks would have been in the absence of WCSAxes. We might want to consider having e.g. ``CoordinateHelper.get_ticks()`` and ``CoordinateHelper.get_ticklabels()`` for this.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start by reviewing WCSAxes and CoordinateHelper, including how ax.xaxis and ax.yaxis currently expose tick information. Define the public API needed to return WCS-aware tick locations and labels for each coordinate axis, with behavior suitable for non-Matplotlib viewers such as bqplot.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
matplotlib, python
Domain
data-visualization
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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