Plotting the solar limb

This example demonstrates how you can draw the limb as seen by an arbitrary observer.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import sunpy.map
from sunpy.coordinates import get_body_heliographic_stonyhurst
from sunpy.visualization.limb import draw_limb

Let’s download a magnetic field synoptic map and read it into a Map.

syn_map = sunpy.map.Map('http://jsoc.stanford.edu/data/hmi/synoptic/hmi.Synoptic_Mr.2191.fits')
syn_map.plot_settings['cmap'] = 'hmimag'
syn_map.plot_settings['norm'] = plt.Normalize(-1500, 1500)

Get coordinates for Earth and Mars at the date of the synoptic map

coords = {body: get_body_heliographic_stonyhurst(body, syn_map.date)
          for body in ['Earth', 'Mars']}

Now we can plot the map the the solar limb seen from these two coordinates. To create a legend for these limbs, we need to keep the patches returned by draw_limb() and provide them to legend().

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12, 5))
ax = plt.subplot(projection=syn_map)
im = syn_map.plot()

visible_limbs = []
for (body, coord), color in zip(coords.items(), ['tab:blue', 'tab:red']):
    v, _ = draw_limb(ax, coord, color=color, label=f'Limb seen from {body}', linewidth=2)
    visible_limbs.append(v)

ax.legend(handles=visible_limbs)
plt.show()

Out:

INFO: Missing metadata for solar radius: assuming the standard radius of the photosphere. [sunpy.map.mapbase]