National Aeronautics and Space Administration

New interactive visualization tools developed by the NASA/European Space Agency (ESA) Helioviewer Project allow scientists and the general public to explore images of the sun captured by NASA and ESA solar observing spacecraft. This week, Geeked On Goddard takes a close look at these new tools, explaining how they work and what you can do with them.



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Last week on June 7, Goddard solar scientist Jack Ireland woke up around 6 am and checked the website Helioviewer.org to find out what people were looking at on the sun. He saw that 36 minutes earlier, some anonymous person on the Internet had posted a video of an enormous eruption on the sun’s surface.

“I checked it out, and thought it was spectacular and unlike anything I had ever seen before,” Ireland recalls. Ireland sent out an email alerting his colleagues (and Geeked On Goddard) of the event.

Hello All,

Found this event on Helioviewer.org this morning, courtesy of our users. I thought you might be interested in it. The event is still in progress right now.  Quite spectacular.

Cheers,
Jack

[Unfortunately, that anonymous user took down the Helioviewer-made video of the eruption that Ireland's email originally linked to, so we don't know who he or she was.]

Over the next 24 hours, the dramatic fountaining prominence eruption amazed the world — and showed the power of Helioviewer, which Ireland has played a key role in creating.

If you’ve never heard of Helioviewer, go right now to the helioviewer.org website. That glowing orange-yellow ball you see is the sun as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. You see what the spacecraft sees — as recently as 20 minutes ago. And that’s just the start.

You can change “channels” on the sun, observing its churning surface from different sensors on the spacecraft. You can mix the channels together to create unique new images, revealing features and processes occurring at different temperatures and locations.

The Helioviewer Project’s primary mission is to provide innovative new tools to solar scientists. But aspiring “citizen scientists” are also welcome. For example, a recently added feature allows you to create short time-lapse videos of the sun and then upload them quickly on YouTube — or save a copy for yourself on your computer. (The unknown user who discovered the June 7 prominence used the YouTube uploader to report his finding.)

How it all started
The Helioviewer Project began at Goddard in 2004-2005. It is a partnership of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The effort has produced two complementary tools: the Helioviewer.org website and an installable piece of software called JHelioviewer.

The Helioviewer Project team at Goddard consists of Ireland and computer programmer Keith Hughitt, both based in the Heliophysics Science Division. Summer interns have also contributed at various times.

Ireland conceived of Helioviewer in 2004 and started building a prototype. ESA’s Daniel Müller, the deputy project scientist for the ESA/NASA Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), started working on JHelioviewer  in 2007 while based at Goddard. Hughitt joined them in 2008. Together, they started the Helioviewer Project, which combines the efforts of Helioviewer.org and JHelioviewer, as well as various “back end” programming on the servers that help power the front-end visualization tools that users actually interact with. Müller returned to Europe in 2010, and ESA officially released the JHelioviewer software late that same year.

Seeing like a satellite
Ireland says the motivation for creating both Helioviewer.org and JHelioviewer was to make it easier to access the wealth of scientific data from various satellite sources.

“It occurred to me that we have a lot of different websites that visualize different observations about a single object, the sun,” he says. “Having many disparate websites and browse tools didn’t make too much sense.”

Ireland also just wanted to see the sun as an integrated whole, the way SOHO and SDO see it. He remembers one day watching two different SOHO images of the sun — one with the sun itself filling the monitor, and another showing the solar disk in the middle of its much more extended outer atmosphere.

“But what you actually see and what your physical understanding is that the sun is in the middle of this bigger space. So why couldn’t we see that? I mean, that’s what’s out there. My original motivation was just to try to reproduce on a web site, somehow, everything of what the spacecraft see.”

To do so called for a tool that would superimpose different images on the same space, in perfect alignment. That initial concept became Helioviewer.

Complementary tools
Helioviewer currently draws on image data from SDO as well as more than a million images collected by SOHO, which became operational in 1996. A limited set of images from the twin STEREO spacecraft are now available, and that access will expand with time.

To get started, first try the Web-based Helioviewer.org. It allows you to browse images, zoom in, make a screen shot, or create a short video of up to a week of solar activity, using up to 300 different solar images.

JHelioviewer is standalone software written in the Java computer language, hence the moniker JHelioviewer. To start, download it from the JHelioviewer.org site and install it on your computer. Versions are available for Mac, Windows, or Linux operating systems.

JHelioviewer has more powerful capabilities than Helioviewer.org, but the tools complement each other, Hughitt explains.

“The Web app is very easy to start using and does not require installing any software, while JHelioviewer, on the other hand, requires a little more setup but has a more flexible movie streaming system and supports some basic image processing that is not yet available on the web version. The projects are meant to be complimentary efforts; think Google Maps and Google Earth.”

TOMORROW: A closer look at Helioviewer.org and its features.




LEARN MORE

Helioviewer.org (Web app)

A collection of video highlights from 2011 (so far) created by Helioviewer.org users.

See a Helioviewer.org video made by “citizen scientist” LudzikLegoTechnics on YouTube.

The Helioviewer Project Wiki:

JHelioviewer (downloadable software)

Read a Web feature about JHelioviewer and its capabilities

The JHelioviewer online handbook

JHelioviewer video tutorial on YouTube HD

ESA Web feature about JHelioviewer.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.




_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

Thanks to the amazing software JHelioviewer by NASA Goddard and the European Space Agency, here is an extreme close-up shot of this morning’s prominence eruption.

As quoted in The Universe Today by Nancy Atkinson:

“I’ve never seen material released like this before, such a huge amount that falls back down in such a spectacular way,” says Dr. C. Alex Young in the video. “It looks like someone just kicked a giant clod of dirt into the air and it fell back down.” Young added that this event will probably not cause any problems as far as space weather affecting Earth.







_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.



This morning, Jack Ireland of NASA Goddard’s Helioviewer Project sent an email alerting us to a “spectacular” event still in progress on the sun. It was a huge prominence eruption, marked by a solar flare and release of energetic particles. It looks like a fountain of plasma that blasts out of the solar surface, spreads outward, and collapses to splat back down.

Here is video courtesy Helioviewer.org and a narration by The Sun Today.



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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.







The eruption that occurred on the sun last week, February 24, was many times larger than Earth in scale and represented a tremendous release of energy. But what exactly happened? Here is a wide view of the event:







This type of event is called a prominence eruption. It occurs in the extended, hot outer atmosphere of the sun, called the corona. The material that appears to glow red is plasma, a mix of electrically charged hydrogen and helium.


OK, now let’s take a closer look. Here is a close-up view of the prominence:






The plasma is flowing along a tangled and twisted structure of magnetic fields generated by the sun’s internal dynamo. Prominences occur when such a structure becomes unstable and bursts outward, releasing plasma.

At Goddard, Holly Gilbert is one of the physicists trying to understand what triggers such explosive events. We have a pretty good idea of what prominence eruptions are, but less of a clear idea of what causes them.

“Here you have a magnetic structure that holds prominence plasma and somehow become unstable and erupts,” Gilbert says, “and by doing so you get this beautiful structure not only flying outward and escaping the gravitational field, but only also draining back because the magnetic topology allows it to do so. What we’re not sure of is what is initiating the eruption.”

In the video, the event appears to stop and start playing backward. But this is not so. Actually, plasma is falling back toward the sun and flowing along the complex surfaces formed by magnetism around the sun.

“It is not uncommon for prominence material to drain back to the surface as well as escape during an eruption,” Gilbert says. “In fact, it’s a little strange when ALL of the mass escapes. Prominences are large structures, so once the magnetic fields supporting the mass are stretched out so that they are more vertical, it allows an easy path for some of the mass to drain back down.”

This particular eruption was not directed toward Earth. If it were, the material released and its imprinted magnetic field might have triggered a geomagnetic storm, with bright auroras and the potential for disturbance in communications and electrical power networks. Scientists at NASA study such “space weather” events intensely in hopes of predicting them better someday.

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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

I recently spoke to NASA solar physicist Holly Gilbert about a solar prominence eruption caught by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. These great looping eruptions of hot plasma are one of Gilbert’s main research interests. Here is what she had to say.


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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.

This week the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) “Pick of the Week” offers a video clip of a massive loop of hot plasma caught by one of NASA’s twin STEREO spacecraft. Here’s a video loop of the event, compressing hours of time into a few seconds.



Says the SOHO website:

The STEREO (Ahead) spacecraft watched as an eruptive prominence near the back of the Sun arched up but then headed back to the Sun’s surface over a few hours (Sept. 19, 2010). Prominence eruptions occur fairly frequently and with both STEREO spacecraft now able to see most of the Sun, we do observe more of them.



And one great prominence deserves another. Check out this whopper from back in April:


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OH AND DID I MENTION? All opinions and opinionlike objects in this blog are mine alone and NOT those of NASA or Goddard Space Flight Center. And while we’re at it, links to websites posted on this blog do not imply endorsement of those websites by NASA.