Over at the Visual.ly blog, they have a public plea to NASA (and anyone else reading) to finally give up on rainbow colormaps in favor of other more appropriate ones.
Dear NASA,The visualization community has noticed your insistence on using rainbow color scales for representing continuous data. This is a plea to you and anyone else doing the same thing to stop.On the surface, the logic behind using a rainbow color scale makes sense: the more colors there are, the easier you would expect it to be to see detail in a huge range of data. However, when perceptual issues are taken into account, rainbow color schemes are one of the worst ways to represent continuous data.
More than just latching onto the community hate for rainbow colormaps, they actually do a nice job describing and showcasing the many problems both perceptually and scientifically with rainbow colormaps. Definitely worth a check.
via Dear NASA: No More Rainbow Color Scales, Please | Visual.ly Blog.
