SpiralMap

A Python library of the Milky Way's spiral arms.

The detailed documentation is hosted on Read the docs.

For a quickstart please refer to the accompanying Jupyter notebook.

Read the preprint at arxiv.

Features

• Access 9 independent spiral arm models from literature. We are open to requests for including other spiral arm models.
• Extract the 2D trace of individual or all spiral arms from a particular model.
• Directly overplot spiral arms with choice of Cartesian or Polar coordinates, and in Heliocentric or Galactocentric frames.

Updates

• Missing Local arm (logarithmic) added to Hou-Han 2014 model.
• Vallee 1995 model included.
• Dependencies included

Installation

Install the latest released version using pip:

   pip install SpiralMap

Acknowledging SpiralMap

If you make use of our package, please cite the accompanying paper.

Additionally, please also cite the individual spiral model used. To facilitate this, we provide a BibTex file with the relevant citations in 'datafiles/spiral.bib' (on GitHub), or alternatively these are also available on Read the docs.