The skymap package provides a astronomically oriented interface to ploting sky maps based on matplotlib.basemap. This package addresses several issues present in the healpy plotting routines:
healpysupports a limited set of sky projections (cartview,mollview, andgnomview)healpyconverts sparse healpix maps to full maps to plot; this is memory intensive for largenside
In addition, skymap provides some convenience functionality for large optical surveys.
The best way to install skymap is if you have anaconda installed. If you have trouble, check out the .travis.yml file. The procedure below will create a conda environment and pip install skymap:
conda create -n skymap numpy scipy pandas matplotlib basemap astropy ephem healpy nose -c conda-forge
source activate skymap
pip install skymap
If you want the bleeding edge of skymap, you can follow the directions above to create the conda environment, but then install by cloning directly from github:
git clone https://github.com/kadrlica/skymap.git
cd skymap
python setup.py install
If you want to see what you can do with skymap, check out the tutorial.