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### A.5.9 Cube Plot Window

Cube Plot Window

The Cube Plot () plots 3-dimensional Cartesian positions in a 3-d space. See the Window Overview for features common to all layer plots.

The positional coordinates are X, Y and Z. To control the direction and linear/log scaling of the axes, see the Coords tab of the Axes control.

Navigation controls:

Panning
  Rotate the plot by holding down the left mouse button. It's also possible to rotate by using the rotation sliders in the View tab of the Axes control.

  To re-centre the plot in the visible cube, right-click on the position you're interested in. A screen position represents a line not a point, so there is a degeneracy here; the new central position is actually the average of data point positions near the mouse click. The upshot is that if you click on a point or clump of interest, it should end up in the centre of the cube.

Zooming
  You can zoom using the mouse wheel or the zoom buttons (/) on the toolbar. Either of these zooms the data volume in the visible cube about its centre, so the cube wireframe axes stay in the same place on the screen, but the axis annotations move.

  If you want to zoom in or out on the cube wireframe itself, you can do it using the Zoom Factor slider in the View tab of the Axes control.

The cube plot offers the following plot controls:

- Table Layer Control, with these form options:
  - Mark
  - Size
  - Vector
  - Error Bars
  - Ellipse
  - Pair Link
  - Triple Link
  - Line
  - Text Label
  - Contour

Note that use of the Auto and Density shading modes can be confusing in 3 dimensions with multiple datasets. This is because pixels based on density along a line of sight are not located at any point on that line, so shaded pixels can't appear at the "right" place in the 3-d space. The same applies to a lesser extent with contours. They work fine with a single dataset though.

The Axes control () is described in the next subsection.

- A.5.9.1 Cube Axes Control

Next Previous Up Contents
Next: Cube Axes Control
Up: Layer Plot Windows
Previous: Sky Axes Control

TOPCAT - Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
Starlink User Note253
TOPCAT web page: http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
Author email: m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk
Mailing list: topcat-user@bristol.ac.uk