orbits

orbits(xyz::Matrix{<:Real}; first=true, radius=6371.007, height=0, lon0=0, lat0=0, show=false, kw...)

keywords: GMT, Julia, orbits plots

Plots the orbit, or whatever the input data in xyz represents, about the Earth or other planetary bodies.

xyz: The orbit coordinates. By default, we expect the coordinates in the Earth Centered Earth Fixed (ECEF) system but they can be in spherical coordinates (lon, lat) as well. In this case xyz must be a Mx2 matrix and height (the orbit height) must be > 0. If this argument is omitted, we plot a demo spiral "orbit".

radius: The planetary body (spherical) radius. This value may be passed in meters or km and is only used when input is passed in spherical coordinates.

first: Boolean that indicates if orbits creates the first layer of the image plot. If the default value of true is used, we also make a call to coast to plot the Earth using an Orthographic projection. The default option for this is plot the coastlines only, bur other options, e.g. colorizing the continents, are also available via the kw... arguments. Setting first=false, or better, use the orbits! form, skips the coast call, which lets this plot be appended to a previous plot as for example the one produced by grdimage on a Eart's DEM. Note, however, that in this case the previous plot must have used the same lon0 and lat0 otherwise the visible orbit will be wrong.

height: Used when input xyz is a Mx2 (lon, lat) matrix and represents the height in meters above the sphere of radius radius. (MUST be > 0 and not 'too small' or this function's algorithm fails.)

show: Set this to true if want to see the produced image. Leaving it as false permits adding more elements by posterior plotting calls.

kw: keyword arguments to be consumed in the coast and plot3 calls. For example, land=:tomato, lw=1, lc=:blue paints the continent with the tomato color and plots the orbits with blue, 1pt thick lines.

Examples

Plot the demo spiral.

using GMT
orbits(show=true)