D A Green (2011) http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5083start defines the starting point along the color wheel in radians. cycles defines how many color wheel cycles span the palette range. Larger values of saturation produce more saturated color; saturation 5#5 1 may lead to clipping of the individual RGB components and to intensity becoming non-monotonic. The palette is also affected by set palette gamma. The default values are
set palette cubehelix start 0.5 cycles -1.5 saturation 1 set palette gamma 1.5