![]() Different streams of solar images could be viewed and manipulated in or JHelioviewer, the way live feeds a network of correspondents around the world is combined in CNN’s studio in Atlanta. Another way to look at it is as the equivalent of a live global broadcast on CNN. It would be like creating a parallel Internet for solar image data. So, repositories in Europe could host images from satellites other than SDO, SOHO, or STEREO, or even archives of images from ground-based observatories. “So when I got to the Goddard database and say, ‘Hey, I want this kind of data,’ it says ‘I don’t have it, but this guy over here has it.’ That’s a distributed system.” “What you want is for the databases to talk to each other,” Ireland says. That’s mainly because some amount of pre-processing is required for the images to integrate seamlessly.īut Ireland and the Helioviewer Project’s co-founders Keith Hughitt and Daniel Müller, hope to see Helioviewer evolve into a more distributed system, able to access multiple archives of solar images residing at different locations in the world. Right now, all the solar images accessible to and JHelioviewer reside on Goddard’s servers. These FITS files, which astronomers use to do their research, are a whopping 64 Mb in size. The Solar Dynamics Observatory image files (about 1Mb in size) that and JHelioviewer use are highly compressed versions of the raw Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files, the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. In future, it should be possible to click a link and download the actual raw data files being visualized, so scientists could work with them locally. The JHelioviewer team wants to change that. Right now, you can view and visualize solar images in and JHelioviewerbut do not have direct access to the actual raw instrument data. ![]() So what’s next? Here are some new things to look for as the Helioviewer Project goes forward. “Some member of the public, some citizen scientist, found this.” (It’s actually electrically charged plasma caught up in twisted magnetic fields.) Check out this tornado-like feature on the sun by a non-scientist playing with and uploaded to YouTube. A growing number of time-lapse solar videos made using Helioviewer are now found on YouTube. “The reaction has been, ‘This is really cool I’d like to see more.'”Ĭitizen scientists have begun to play with the tools, too. So far, solar scientists who have seen the Helioviewer Project’s Web app ( ) and downloadable software ( JHelioviewer) are intrigued, says Helioviewer Project co-founder Jack Ireland. This final post in the series looks at the what’s coming next from the Helioviewer Project. Previous posts explained the origins and aims of the Helioviewer Project, and the basics of a Web-based app called. New interactive visualization tools developed by the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Helioviewer Project allow scientists and the general public to explore images captured by solar observing spacecraft. Post 5 of 5: Helioviewer’s future: an Internet for solar image data Post 4 of 5: How it works: building the Helioviewer “back end” with JPEG2000 Post 3 of 5: Explore the sun in depth with JHelioviewer Post 1 of 5: Explore the sun on your desktop with Helioviewer
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