How-To Guides

These how-to guides provide examples of how to perform specific tasks with sunpy. They are recipes that do not provide much in-depth explanation and assume you have some knowledge of what sunpy is and how it works. If you’re starting fresh you might want to check out the The sunpy tutorial first.

• Access coordinate components
• How to create a sunpy Map
• Create Coordinate Objects
• Create Custom Maps by Hand
• Create Custom TimeSeries
• Fixing incorrect metadata
• Parse times with parse_time
• Use the Remote Data Manager
• Search for multiple wavelengths with Fido
• Search the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO)
• Transform between coordinate frames

Quick Reference

The following table is meant as a quick reference. For more complete code examples, see the how-to guides above.

How do I…	Solution
create a map from a FITS file	my_map = Map('file.fits')
save a map to a FITS file	my_map.save('another_file.fits')
get a quicklook summary of a map	my_map.quicklook(), my_map.peek()
plot a map	my_map.plot()
access the underlying data array of a map	my_map.data
access the map metadata	my_map.meta
make a copy of the map data array	my_map.data.copy()
make a copy of the whole map	copy.deepcopy(my_map)
access the observer location	my_map.observer_coordinate
remove the roll angle	my_map.rotate()
plot the solar limb	my_map.draw_limb()
overlay a heliographic grid	my_map.draw_grid()
create a time series	my_timeseries = TimeSeries('file.nc')
plot a time series	my_timeseries.plot()
concatenate two time series together	my_timeseries.concatenate(another_timeseries)
convert a time series to a pandas.DataFrame	my_timeseries.to_dataframe()
convert a time series to an astropy.table.Table	my_timeseries.to_table()
parse the string representation of a timestamp	parse_time()
calculate the Carrington rotation number at a given time	carrington_rotation_number()
calculate the time corresponding to a given Carrington rotation	carrington_rotation_time()
see all of the available solar constants	sunpy.sun.constants.print_all()