SunPy Maps

Overview

One of core classes in SunPy is a Map. A SunPy Map object is simply a spatially-aware data array, often an image. In order to make it easy to work with image data in SunPy, the Map object provides a number of methods for commonly performed operations. Further, because SunPy Map objects are instances inherit from the NumPy ndarray datatype, they behave like ndarrays and support the same operations as ndarrays.

Creating Map Objects

SunPy Map objects are constructed using the special function make_map():

>>> x = sunpy.make_map('file.fits')

The result of a call to make_map will be either a generic Map object, or a subclass of Map which deals with a specific type of data, e.g. AIAMap or LASCOMap.

Map Classes

Map

The top-level class from which all other Maps inherit from.

MapHeader

Header information for Map objects are stored in a class called MapHeader.

CompositeMap

A Composite Map is a Map object which contains one or more layers, representing for example a stack of images with varying opacities.

MapCube

A MapCube is a three-dimension generalization of the Map class, for example, a time series of images.

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