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.






MONDAY November 29: The MODIS Image of the Day features southern Mexico and Central America, a striking true-color image of green vegetation and rugged tan mountain tops.

Chimps in space! On this day in 1961, Enos the chimp blasted off on a test flight aboard a Mercury Atlas 5. He experienced a peak acceleration of 7.6 g’s during launch and endured two orbits in just over 3 hours before returning to Earth safely.

More awesomeness: The NASA Blueshift Weekly Awesomeness Round Up features colliding galaxies, a runaway star, and Comet Hartley 2 in 3D.


TUESDAY November 30: Today NASA’s Cassini spacecraft dipped near the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus imaged shadowy regions of the tortured south polar terrain and the brilliant jets that spray out from it.

WEDNESDAY December 1: New images and data from a Cassini fly by Aug. 13, 2010, give scientists a unique Saturn-lit view of active fissures in the south polar region of Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

A week in the sun: The SDOmision2009 YouTube channel features the “7 day sun” video. For seven days (November 13-19), the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s HMI instrument watched as a small sunspot group morphed, merged, and grew into two large sunspots.


THURSDAY December 2: Today, NASA’s solar and heliospheric observatory (SOHO) marks 15 years in space. SOHO is perhaps best known for its observations of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. SOHO has, over the years, emerged into the greatest comet-finder of all time. As of November 1, 2010, SOHO had spotted more than 1,940 of comets.

Poison bugs: After days of wild speculation in the press, including false rumors about life discovered on Saturn’s moon Titan, NASA announced discovery of a bacteria that is the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic.

Sofia science: NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy, or SOFIA, completed the first of three science flights today to demonstrate the aircraft’s potential to make discoveries about the infrared universe. A Goddard team has an instrument aboard the observatory called SAFIRE, “the Far-Infrared Imaging Spectrometer for SOFIA.”

Black ops: A team led by Goddard’s John Hagopian wins an innovation award for developing an exotic coating that is “blacker than black” and may be used someday to damp stray light pollution on spacecraft. Each year, the Goddard Office of the Chief Technologist bestows the award on those who exemplify the best in research and development at the center. Also, don’t miss the video about Hagopian’s work.

Hubble fix-it team: On this day in 1993, the STS-61 shuttle mission went into space to undertake the first Hubble Space Telescope servicing operation, repairing the observatory’s optics and perform routine servicing.


FRIDAY December 3: On this day in 1973, Pioneer 10 made the first spacecraft observations of Jupiter, passing within 81,000 miles of the cloudtops.

Lost: On this day in 1999, the Mars Polar Lander reached Mars. While attempting a direct entry into Mars’ atmosphere, the probe was lost.


SATURDAY December 4: NASA research physicist Brent Bos gives a presentation about the James Webb Space Telescope at the Imagination Station science center in Toledo, Ohio.

Let’s get started: On this day in 1998, the first International Space Station assembly flight, STS-88, launched.


_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.


Takes a licking, keeps on ticking — you could say that about a lot of “birds” developed at Goddard Space Flight Center. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, is one of them.

On December 2, 1995, SOHO blasted into space from Cape Canaveral. The joint European Space Agency/NASA project soon began its work observing the sun. If you want to know the how, whats, and whys, please read the excellent press release by my colleague Karen Fox and the a short feature on The Sun Today website. Or browse the latest SOHO imagery of the sun.

But here are the take-homes:

• “Fifteen years later, SOHO has revolutionized what we know about the solar atmosphere and violent solar storms produced by the sun.”
• “SOHO has become an expert comet-hunter…”
• “…helped create the field of near-real-time space weather reporting as we know it…”
• “Placed into orbit around the L1 Lagrangian point between Earth and the sun, SOHO was able to observe the sun continuously without Earth ever obstructing its view.”
• “SOHO is perhaps best known for its observations of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs.”
• “…as of November 1, 2010, SOHO had spotted more than 1,940 [comaets.] (A contest to predict the day on which the 2,000th will be spotted is here.)”
• “The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory or SOHO is by many accounts the granddaddy of modern solar astronomy.”

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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.

MONDAY October 18: It’s solar week! Celebrate the best star we’ve ever had.

What’s the big idea? On this day in 1899, 17-year-old Robert H. Goddard got a crazy idea.

Wavy: A sinuous satellite view of Fort Yukon, Alaska, featured on the ASTER Image of the Day.

Celebrity star: A SOHO solar snapshot makes it onto the massively popular website, Astronomy Picture of the Day.


TUESDAY October 19: Goddard Flickr page posts bloody false-color image of Susitna Glacier in Alaska, captured previously by NASA’s Terra satellite.

Awesomeness Update: NASA Blueshift’s round-up of the previous week’s astro-highlights features a new Webb Telescope video, an asteroid collision, and award-winning Goddard science.

On the edge: This day in 2008, the International Boundary Explorer (IBEX) spacecraft launched on a journey to study the border between our solar system and interstellar space.


THURSDAY October 21: The What On Earth blog Earth Buzz features weather satellites, pyrocumulonimbus clouds, a solar stumper, and more.

Just the facts, ma’am: NASA Blueshift ponders whether the science on the “Big Bang Theory” show  is accurate.

Slammed: The LCROSS mission slammed a spent booster into the moon; here’s what they stirred up.

FRIDAY October 22: Scientists returned this week to the Southern Hemisphere where NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission is set to begin its second year of airborne surveys over Antarctica.


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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.


Here’s the latest Picture of the Week from the Solar Dynamics Observatory, courtesy of Goddard’s solar media specialist Steele Hill.

The image depicts a large-scale feature called a coronal hole. It was created from observations in the extreme ultraviolet that SDO captured August 23-25. The “hole” is an area that colder, darker, and less dense than surrounding parts of the sun’s corona, or outer atmosphere. Here, the contours of the sun’s magnetic field allow hot star stuff — the solar wind — to stream out at high speed.

Thanks to Steele’s diligent work, these Picture of the Week features — there is also one for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) — stream out to hundreds of science and nature centers all over the country.

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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.

Here’s a dramatic short video from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) “Pick of the Week” website. The images were actually captured by one of the twin STEREO spacecraft.



Here’s the detailed explanation from the Pick of the Week site:

As the STEREO (Behind) spacecraft observed in extreme UV light, the sun popped off no fewer than six eruptions over just two days (Aug. 14-15, 2010). At one point, three were occurring events at the same time. Most these were eruptive prominences in which cooler clouds of gases above the surface break away from the sun. The most powerful of these events, a coronal mass ejection, began around 6:30 UT on Aug. 15. It was harder to see from this spacecraft’s angle since it blasted out from the whiter active region in the lower center, so it had the sun as its backdrop.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.

[Um.... Make that the TUESDAY video rewind picture show. We had a network outage yesterday, so sorry about that. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming. . . ]

Given the recent upturn in stormy solar activity, it seemed a good time to revisit the spectacular piece of visualization known as Sentinels of the Heliosphere. This video debuted in 2009 at SIGGRAPH, an international conference and exhibition on computer graphics and interactive techniques.






_____________________________________________________________________________________________________ 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.

Like most earthlings, you probably didn’t make it to Easter Island to see the solar eclipse on Sunday July 11. But here’s something you would not have been able to see even from Easter Island: a combined space-and-surface view of the eclipse.

This is another in the series of fantastic solar images that Goddard’s Steele Hill releases to science museums and other public places every week from the Solar Dyanamics Observatory (SDO), SOHO, and STEREO spacecraft. Hill is one of our media people for those three missions.

Steele created this image by combining an image taken by the Williams College Expedition to Easter Island (the black-and-white portion) with snapshots from space courtesy of SDO and SOHO.

SOHO’s contribution, in red, shows the sun’s outer atmosphere (corona). To make the corona more visible,  SOHO uses a device called a “coronograph” to cover the glaring central disk. It’s sort of what you do when you hold your palm out to mask the blinding glare of a bright light shining in your eyes.

The Williams College image (again, the black-and-white portion) shows the sun’s inner corona.

Finally, SDO donated the image of the sun’s central disk to cover the silhouette of the moon, which blocked the sun’s glare during the eclipse.

Voila! A truly blogolicious composite of gogblog’s favorite star ever!

In Steele’s own words:

I’ve done this several times before.  The challenge is correctly rotating the image to align the structures in the eclipse image with the structures the coronagraph sees.  Since the eclipse image was taken in the South Pacific, the image has a different perspective versus our spacecraft.  But that did not take too long.  I like the way that we can combine ground-based and space-borne images and bring the three perspectives together.

For additional details about this image, read the NASA image release from this morning. And let’s not forget to thank Jay M. Pasachoff, Muzhou Lu, and Craig Malamut from the Williams College Eclipse Expedition for allowing this use of their image.

An earlier gogblog post explores one of Steele Hill’s previous solar images from SDO.

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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.