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Time Plot Window
The Time Plot (
)
is intended for plotting time series data.
The horizontal axis represents time, and can be labelled accordingly
(for instance in minutes, hours, days, months and years),
and the window can display appropriate types of plot including spectrograms.
To define the time coordinate, use the Time selector
in position tabs as usual.
Note however that this contains a time format selector
on the right hand side that indicates how the selected quantity
will be interpreted as a time value.
The options are:
-
DecYear:
Years since 0AD
-
MJD:
Modified Julian Date (days since 17 Nov 1858)
-
JD:
Julian Day (days since 1 Jan 4713 BC)
-
Unix:
Seconds since midnight 1 Jan 1970
-
Iso8601:
ISO 8601 date-time string
If the input table contains suitable metadata,
for instance in a CDF file or a TIMESYS-bearing VOTable 1.4,
additional options may be available that are taken from
information in the table.
TOPCAT will make a guess at the correct format to use,
but if it gets it wrong you can set the format selector manually.
The format selector is updated to the best guess when you choose
a new Time value; if you want to stop it doing that, use the
Lock button (
).
Unlike the other plot windows (at time of writing) the Time plot
can display different data plots in different plot
Zones
stacked vertically on top of each other, so that different plots
share a time axis but have their own Y axis.
Note: This multi-zone feature is somewhat experimental,
and the user interface may change in future versions.
The Time Plot offers the following plot controls:
-
Position Layer Control, with these form options:
-
Histogram Layer Control with these form options:
Note that some of these histogram-like controls offer the
Combine option that lets you define how values
are combined together.
If you choose the sum-per-unit
or count-per-unit
options, you can also use the Per Unit selector
to determine whether values are represented as sums/counts per
second, hour, day, year, etc.
-
Spectrogram Layer Control
-
Function Layer Control
As well as the standard actions,
this window additionally provides the following toolbar button:
See the Window Overview
for features common to all plotting windows.
The following subsections describe
zones,
navigation and
axis configuration.
Next Previous Up Contents
Next: Plot Zones
Up: Plot Windows
Previous: Corner 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@jiscmail.ac.uk