****************** Controlling Axes ****************** Changing Axis Units ******************* WCSAxes also allows users to change the units of the axes of an image. In the example in :doc:`slicing_datacubes`, the x axis represents velocity in m/s. We can change the unit to an equivalent one by: .. plot:: :context: reset :nofigs: from astropy.wcs import WCS from astropy.io import fits from astropy.utils.data import get_pkg_data_filename filename = get_pkg_data_filename('l1448/l1448_13co.fits') hdu = fits.open(filename)[0] wcs = WCS(hdu.header) import matplotlib.pyplot as plt ax = plt.subplot(projection=wcs, slices=(50, 'y', 'x')) ax.imshow(hdu.data[:, :, 50].transpose()) .. plot:: :context: :include-source: :align: center import astropy.units as u ax.coords[2].set_major_formatter('x.x') # Otherwise values round to the nearest whole number ax.coords[2].set_format_unit(u.km / u.s) Changing Axis Directions ************************ Sometimes astronomy FITS files don't follow the convention of having the longitude increase to the left, so we want to flip an axis so that it goes in the opposite direction. To do this on our example image: .. plot:: :context: :include-source: :align: center ax.invert_xaxis()