How to assign XTickLabels a subset of date strings?

I'm using imagesc to plot ocean current magnitude against depth (y-axis) and time (x-axis). The call looks like this:

imagesc([1 1772], [depth(1) depth(end)], speed);

where depth is a vector of 38 non-regularly-spaced doubles (representing depth values), [1 1772] refers to the number of columns of the speed matrix (each column corresponds to a datetime object), and speed is a matrix whose elements contain ocean current magnitudes (38 rows for 38 depth values, 1772 columns for 1772 datetime objects).

There are 1772 datetime values for the x-axis so there's no way their corresponding datetime string can fit on the imagesc plot. How do I set the XTickLabels for selected x values (i.e., I'd only like there to be a timestamp for column 1, 186, 217, ... (corresponding to datetime objects that are 6 months apart))?

I tried creating a 1x1772 cellstr vector with empty cell strings where dates don't correspond to the dates I wanted displayed but only one date tick gets displayed (the first date):

XTickIdx = 1:186:1772; % Index into datetime vector; 10 values
c = cell(1,1772); 
c(1:186:1772) = cellstr(datestr(t(XTickIdx),'mm/dd/yyyy')); % 't' is the datetime array
axes.XTickLabel = c;

Answer 1

[Adam Danz]

Instead of setting XTickLabel, just set XTicks. Assuming your datetime vector is named 'dateTimeVector',

set(gca, 'xtick', dateTimeVector(1:186:1772))