APLpy is a Python module aimed at producing publication-quality plots of astronomical imaging data in FITS format. The module uses matplotlib, a powerful and interactive plotting package. It is capable of creating output files in several graphical formats, including EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG.

Main features:

• Make plots interactively or using scripts

• Show grayscale, colorscale, and 3-color RGB images of FITS files

• Generate co-aligned FITS cubes to make 3-color RGB images

• Make plots from FITS files with arbitrary WCS (e.g. position-velocity)

• Slice multi-dimensional FITS cubes

• Overlay any number of contour sets

• Overlay markers with fully customizable symbols

• Plot customizable shapes like circles, ellipses, and rectangles

• Overlay ds9 region files

• Overlay coordinate grids

• Show colorbars, scalebars, and beams

• Customize the appearance of labels and ticks

• Hide, show, and remove different contour and marker layers

• Pan, zoom, and save any view as a full publication-quality plot

• Save plots as EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG