Although a variety of colormaps have previously been specifically developed for displaying cosmic microwave background (CMB) maps, none of these have been designed with perceptual uniformity or color-vision-deficiency (CVD) accessibility in mind. To improve upon this status quo, in support of publications1 for the 2022 data release for the Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS), I used Matplotlib’s Viscm tool to develop a new diverging colormap that resembles the Planck colormap but is mostly perceptually uniform and is perceived similarly by both individuals with typical color vision and those with red or green color-vision deficiencies. The Q-band Stokes U map from the CLASS paper, which uses the new colormap, is shown below.
Y. Li et al., “CLASS Data Pipeline and Maps for 40 GHz Observations through 2022”, arXiv:2305.01045. ↩
