The skyproj package provides an astronomically oriented interface to ploting sky maps based on matplotlib and PROJ. This package addresses several issues present in the healpy plotting routines:

1. healpy supports a limited set of sky projections (cartview, mollview, and gnomview)
2. healpy converts sparse healpix maps to full maps to plot; this is memory intensive for large nside

skyproj is intended as the primary visualization tool for healsparse maps, which provide high resolution maps in a memory efficent way. skyproj can create interactive visualizations of healsparse and healpy maps that dynamically change resolution. In addition, skyproj provides some convenience functionality for large optical surveys. The skyproj package has its origins in cartosky, which was built on cartopy and some of the features may be familiar to users of cartopy. However, it has diverged significantly from the original code as the needs of mapping the sky are somewhat different than the needs of mapping the Earth.

The easiest way to install skyproj is from pypi or conda-forge. (Coming soon.)

If you want to see what you can do with skyproj, check out the tutorial.