I am thinking about plotting a star chart of the whole sky. While it might not be difficult to get the (x,y)-coordinates of fairly good number of stars from star catalogues and to plot them accordingly in a 2d-plot, it might be more difficult to plot the stars according to their brightness. Also, I would like to plot the chart in cylindrical coordinate with astronomical coordinate axes for x and y. Moreover, only the brighter stars should be visible when the whole chart is shown, but when zooming in (while still having the axes visible) to have a closer look at some specific locations where I wand to make some square to show some fields, fainter stars should appear.

Is this possible in Maple ? I'd prefer to do a plot as I can really draw several squares where I want them which is not possible in my planetarium software.

If you have several results, e.g. one being real, the others complex. How can you choose?

Download Worksheet_CaseStudy.mw

Matlab seems to be pretty strong at doing color plots with separate color bars, e.g.

Is this also possible in Maple and somehow in combination with `plots[surfdata](...,color=zhue,...)`?

In a 3d coordinate system I have a circular spacecurve with z-minimum -4 and z-maximum +4. In the same 3d coordinate system I have a 3d surface plot with z-minimum -0.5 and z-maximum +1.3 . When I choose the color option "Z(Hue)" in order to color-code the z-values on the 3d surface and make the topography more clear, I mostly get a totally green 3d surface. It seems that the color scaling is coupled with the spacecurve with z-values of +-4 . How can I uncouple the color scaling from the spacecurve and couple it with the z-range of the surface, while the color-limits shall be at +-1.3 ?

It seems a frequent issue that exported 3d plots are not shown as wished. I experience the same problem. Although I exported in the .eps format into a .tex latex-file the resulting .pdf-file shows a somewhat pixelated image of my 3d plot as if it was created in "Paint". Is there a solution for this in Maple13?