S2PLOT: a straightforward library for advanced 3-dimensional scientific visualisation

S2PLOT is a user-oriented programming library for generating and exploring 3-dimensional (3-d) scientific plots and diagrams. It provides a lightweight interface—inspired by the simple yet widely-used PGPLOT—to produce hardware-accelerated visualisations of point, line, image and volumetric data. S2PLOT provides C and FORTRAN interfaces, and supports monoscopic, stereoscopic and curved (eg. dome) display devices. PGPLOT-savvy astronomers can usually write their first S2PLOT program in less than ten minutes. In this paper, we introduce the latest S2PLOT version and highlight major new additions to the library, including volume rendering and isosurfacing of astronomical data. We describe a simple extension that enables the embedding of large-area FITS images directly into S2PLOT programs using standard World Coordinate Systems, and we introduce the Python interface to S2PLOT.