#432 color codes for spacecraft, spacecraft ID, ephemeris

[Jeremy Faden]

Cluster had a standard conventions for line colors for each of the four spacecraft, and I'm guessing that MMS will as well, but I haven't found a reference for this. (Cluster: http://www.cluster.rl.ac.uk/cdhf_quick_guide_v1.pdf figure on the second page, also this shows nice workflows.)

Autoplot will need to identify spacecraft, which will only work of course when CDF files contain metadata for this, but I should introduce a place to get this started.

Also the ephemeris could leverage off of spacecraft identifiers. Ideally there would be a long list of spacecraft to choose from, and it would be nice if the data could suggest which spacecraft sourced the data.

[Jeremy Faden]

Bob set up a HAPI server for ephemeris.

[K Paulson]

MMS has adopted a standard RGB set of colors to identify each spacecraft when plotted together. They encourage the use of a color-blind compliant palette and outline their preferential colors here:
https://lasp.colorado.edu/galaxy/display/mms/Plot+Standards

[Jeremy Faden]

I know I had that document at one point, and I put support for this with "autoplot_data/config/colors.txt" where you could add your own named colors. I can't get to that document (easily, I probably have the password somewhere), could you copy and paste the relavant parts? I'll make sure those colors are build into the list of named colors.

[K Paulson]

From the document:

Color:
All teams should use the following color conventions for the purpose of scientific presentations:
MMS1: BLACK (change to white if using dark background)
MMS2: RED
MMS3: GREEN
MMS4: BLUE
X,Y,Z is BLUE, GREEN, RED, solid, dashed, dotted
Research into color-blind compliant palettes for QL plots has found the following, with perceived variation demonstrated for non-colorblind users (figure 16 at http://jfly.iam.u-tokyo.ac.jp/color/ ).
The SWG approved use of the following values for use by MMS to maximize contrast for all users.
Red = RGB [213, 94, 0]
Green = RGB [0, 158, 115]
Blue = RGB [86, 180, 233]

[Jeremy Faden]

I've added these to the list of named colors, as: mms2red, mms3green, mms4blue.

[Jeremy Faden]

The .vap parser should look for a comment character, so Chartreuse might be formatted as:

"#7FFF00 (Chartreuse)"

This will allow compatablitiy with .vap files formatted thusly by a future version of Autoplot.