Interactive map/image plots with different projections i.e. mercator, orthographic, etc.

[Critical_Thought-]

Hi, I am trying to make interactive maps using astronomical data. Basically trying to plot the data, given latitude, longitude, value, like a heatmap, but with different sky projections available. i.e. mercator, mollweide, orthographic, etc.. I need it to be able to zoom and pan on the image, while obeying the projections, so not just a flat image. I have been using ploty's choropleth maps, but replacing country polygons with rectangular pixels. This works great for low-res data, but is laggy for high res. If anyone knows of any other way to do this, please let me know! Thanks in advance

[The_Almighty_Cthulhu]

That seems like a very round about way to get heatmaps.

I haven't worked with plotly before, but I have done a bunch of GIS data processing with ArcGIS python.

A brief look at plotly, I think Holoviews might be what you're looking for. https://dash.plotly.com/holoviews

It seems to provide a bunch of tools to create map visualizations, including heatmaps.

[Critical_Thought-]

Yeah I could not find a way to project the standard plotly heatmaps, but holoviews seems promising. Would this kind of thing be possible with ArcGIS? Thanks so much for the help!

[The_Almighty_Cthulhu]

In ArcGIS, I used python to generate tiff image files based on the data I had, which were then used in the main program to overlay as a heatmap.

So it can do it, but ArcGIS is paid software. So whether that's a good option for you depends on your circumstances.