# Freely Rotate WCS Axis Labels

**URL:** <https://community.openastronomy.org/t/freely-rotate-wcs-axis-labels/696>\
**Category:** Astropy\
**Tags:** astropy\
**Created:** [June 26, 2023, 7:09pm UTC](https://community.openastronomy.org/t/freely-rotate-wcs-axis-labels/696 "2023-06-26T19:09:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![TheSkyentist](https://dub1.discourse-cdn.com/flex005/user_avatar/community.openastronomy.org/theskyentist/32/387_2.png) [@TheSkyentist](https://community.openastronomy.org/u/TheSkyentist)\
**Post date:** [June 26, 2023, 7:09pm UTC](https://community.openastronomy.org/t/freely-rotate-wcs-axis-labels/696/1 "2023-06-26T19:09:57Z")

</div>

Hello all,

I am trying to rotate the y-axis label of a WCS plot to a specified angle. Specifically I would like to override the default that forces the text to go from top to bottom when on the right-hand-side of the plot. I’ve tried passing rotation arguments to the WCS axis, or to the matplotlib axis but nothing seems to work. Is there a way to do this? If I pass other arguments, such as color, or fontsize, those are incorporated as expected.

Minimal working example:

```auto
fig = pyplot.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(projection = wcs)
ax.coords['dec'].set_axislabel_position('r')
ax.set_axislabel('Declination',rotation=90)

```