title: What object does matplotlib.imshow() actually return? How to use this object?
body: <p>I was trying to run the following code at the moment:</p>
  
  <pre><code>imgplot = plt.imshow(dose_data, extent = [0,4,0,6], aspect = 'auto')
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>On the console, I typed the following input:</p>
  
  <pre><code>In[38]:imgplot
  Out[38]: &lt;matplotlib.image.AxesImage at 0x123ebd198&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And the output made me wonder what the object is. After consulting the documentation, it seems like an AxesImage object (<a href="http://matplotlib.org/api/image_api.html#matplotlib.image.AxesImage" rel="noreferrer">AxesImage Documentation</a>). However I was wondering how to use the object stored in imgplot. At the moment I can neither see what it is, nor save it to an image.</p>
  
  <p>P.S. I know how to show an image and how to save an image. I was just wondering how this object could be useful and what it actually is (like, is it an image object? an array? or some other weird type of object?)</p>