Jonas cutthrough timeseries script

[JonasSuni]

Usable and tested script for making cutthrough timeseries (aka. time-elongation maps aka. keograms) with Vlasiator data.

[kostahoraites]

this function could be simplified at little cost by converting many of the positional arguments into keyword arguments. This would follow the approach taken in other analysator plotting routines, like plot_colormap3d()

some suggested defaults:
bulkpath='./'
bulkprefix='bulk'
outputname='cutthrough_timeseries.png',
outputdir='./',
intpol=False,
filt=0,
op=None,
cmap='plasma',

[JonasSuni]

I changed the command line argument handling to use argparse instead of sys.argv, so now there are proper defaults and optional arguments.

[JonasSuni]

This has been tested by the way.

[markusbattarbee]

how many? Which ordering of X,Y,Z and points?
What are the default values?

[markusbattarbee]

I'm sorry but a "cut through" function implies some cut along spatial space. This now takes a list of points (From a file!?! What do we do, live in the dark ages?) and plonks those values in the plot array, but the "spatial" axis isn't a proper axis as it's just a list of points.

Having a starting point and an end point and doing a cut between those two positions (using one of the existing cut through functions) would be much preferred.

[JonasSuni]

I have to respectfully disagree with some of these points (no pun intended).

Reading in the list of coordinates from a file is easier in this case when the script is intended to be run directly from the command line.

And continuing with that line of reasoning, this script is intended as an auxiliary tool only that can be run as is.

As for using an arbitrary list of points instead of a cut, this functionality is useful for cases where you want to e.g. plot along a field line or some other non-analytic curve. However, I can change the name of the script and the functions to reflect that this is not a "straight cut".

If I was integrating a function directly into Analysator (like a plot_cutthrough function or something), then I would certainly use the existing cut through functions and implement the straight cut through first. Do let me know if you think that is what I should be doing instead.

[JonasSuni]

Ok I will write a more generic function that takes reasonable non-file input when I have time. (Battarbee & Suni, private communication, 2024)

[alhom]

Quick notes:

• Do what Markus says
• use this

  analysator/pyCalculations/cutthrough.py

  Line 268 in 9322d69

  def cut_through_curve(vlsvReader, curve):

• def main() is great, and that can handle calling the function from the command line, while making the plotting function available for importing via pyplots

This is to be done between now and Jonas' defense.