Toons

Why plot points, when you can draw cartoons?

A "toon" is a representation of a model object, drawn in context. For example, galaxy catalogs typically contain a number of parameters such as RA, Dec, color, magnitude, size, and so on, and astronomers make lots of scatter plots in two of these model parameter dimensions at a time. Plotting each galaxy as a "galtoon" allows more dimensions of the model parameter space to be explored.

You can input galaxy catalog data pertaining to halos, disks and bulges, and the galtoons will plot themselves as a superposition of "blobs" that represent the component properties. Blobs can have position, size, ellipse axis ratio, orientation, colour and brightness, with values chosen by you.

Examples

Code and data for the above plots can be found via these links:

• Bulgeless disks - Bulgeless AGN host galaxies from Galaxy Zoo, color vs stellar mass.
• The Odyssey - galaxies in a square field around "The Odyssey" Milky Way analog galaxy, from the SAGA project.

Still To Do

• Nice halo representations in galtoons
• AGN as point sources in galtoons
• Startoons, planetoons, etc, all using the same blobs as galtoons.

Authors

• Charlotte Mason (UCSB)
• Phil Marshall (KIPAC)
• Brooke Simmons (Oxford)

License etc

GPLv2. Please do fork, improve, and keep in touch! Pull requests welcome.