CubeHelix

In August of 2011 I stumbled across a paper about color schemes for use in astronomical images (Dave Green 2011). I immediately translated the included Fortran code into IDL for use in my own research, and became a vocal advocate for the use of “CubeHelix”.

CubeHelix can now be used in many visualiation languages, including:

• IDL
• Python
• d3
• Tableau

My CubeHelix code has been incorporated in several other packages:

• David Fanning’s Coyote IDL library
• Michael Galloy’s IDL Library
• HEALPix IDL library
• P3D Fiber-fed spectrograph reduction tool
• Randolph Voorhies’ OpenCV Python library
• Matt Davis’ palettable Python module