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A.4.3.4 Aux Axis

The Aux Axis control () is only visible when the Aux colour mode has been selected for one of the data layers; if no layer is using Aux shading, the control will not appear in the stack. It controls a single colour scale for points which are coloured by data value to represent an additional dimension in the data.

When present, this control has three following tabs.

Aux axis control Map tab

Aux axis control Map tab

The Map tab controls the aux axis colour map. It has the following options:

Aux Shader
Select the colour map from a list of options.
Shader Clip
Select a sub-range of the full colour map above. By default the whole colour map is used, but if you want the range of colours in the plot to be formed from only a part of the colour band shown in the Shader control, you can move the handles in from the end of this slider.
Shader Flip
Whether the aux scale should map forwards or backwards into the colour map.
Shader Quantise
Allows the colour map to be quantised. By default, the colour map is effectively continuous. If you slide the slider to the right, or enter a value in the text field, the map will be split into a decreasing number of discrete colours. This can be used to generate a contour-like efect, and may make it easier to trace the boundaries of regions of interest by eye.
Scaling
Determines the function used to map the range of aux data values onto the colour map. Options are linear, logarithmic, square and square root.
Null Colour
What colour should be used to represent points with a null value for the aux data coordinate. If the associated Hide option is selected, then those points will not appear in the plot at all.

Aux axis control Ramp tab

Aux axis control Ramp tab

The Ramp tab controls the display and annotation of the colour ramp that displays the colour map on the plot. It has the following options:

Show Scale
Whether the aux scale ramp is visible; if so an appropriately labelled colour ramp appears at the right of the plot. The associated Auto option makes this decision automatically: if any aux data is plotted, the scale will appear, otherwise it won't. Deselect Auto if you want to determine visibility by hand.
Aux Axis Label
Selects the axis label to be displayed near the aux colour ramp if it is visible. The associated Auto option, if selected, uses the name of one of the coordinates supplying aux data; deselect Auto if you want to enter a label by hand.
Aux Tick Crowding
The slider influences how many tick marks are drawn on the colour ramp.

Aux axis control Range tab

Aux axis control Range tab

The Range tab lets you enter lower and upper values for the aux data range by hand, and provides a double slider to restrict the range within these limits. If either the lower or upper range is left blank, it will be determined from the data.

Note the font used for labelling the aux axis is currently controlled by the font from the Axes selector.


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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