I hope ESASky is more than a pretty picture gallery. The colors are meaningless if one doesn't know what is bright or dimm, and whether some color variation corresponds to much or little intensity variation. So, as an option, it would be nice to be able to see on the side of the image the used colormap including a numerical scale.
Further the choice of the colormaps in ESASky is not optimal as the colormap are not "perceptually uniform".
There exists much better colormaps where the perceive intensity (brightness) for normal human eyes corresponds to the numerical value. Such colormaps make interpreting pictures much easier. I can refer you to the following article of Kovesi : https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03700 or the Matplotlib page explaining how to choose good colormaps:
Dear Deborah,
I hope ESASky is more than a pretty picture gallery. The colors are meaningless if one doesn't know what is bright or dimm, and whether some color variation corresponds to much or little intensity variation. So, as an option, it would be nice to be able to see on the side of the image the used colormap including a numerical scale.
Further the choice of the colormaps in ESASky is not optimal as the colormap are not "perceptually uniform".
There exists much better colormaps where the perceive intensity (brightness) for normal human eyes corresponds to the numerical value. Such colormaps make interpreting pictures much easier. I can refer you to the following article of Kovesi : https://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03700
or the Matplotlib page explaining how to choose good colormaps:
https://matplotlib.org/users/colormaps.htm
if you care about the ~5% of your visitors who are colorblind, there are even colormaps designed for them and others!
Otherwise thanks for this excellent tool !
Best regards,
Daniel