The sun’s rotation can hide sunspot emergence and evolution from telescopes for half of each month. Advanced satellite instruments collect vast additional detail that goes unutilized in 1D graphs of sunspot numbers. Watching high resolution movies of the photosphere quickly reveals the utter inadequacy of historic characterization (sunspot counts, areas, groups) not fully mitigated by centuries of dedicated observation and tabulation by designated official record keepers (today, the Royal Observatory of Belgium). Sunspots are currently catalogued as active regions by NOAA SWPC (reaching AR2807 on, HARP 6285) though the nomenclature itself does not capture initial latitude or hemisphere much less birth, growth and decay processes. Solar research is not driven so much by questions in fundamental physics as by practical applications, notably predicting catastrophic ‘space weather’ events affecting the terrestrial electric grid, orbiting satellite electronics and astronaut safety its followers hope for big X-class flares just Arctic watchers want record melt seasons. Astronomy journals embed advanced graphics and use Dexter format suited to inline analysis in the cryosphere, we are still taking page screenshots. Solar is light-years ahead of Arctic sea ice in terms of Big Data organization and dissemination, though it wouldn’t take much to adapt JHelioviewer to Arctic satellites because like AstroImageJ, it has already been forked to cell biology.
#Jhelioviewer free#
The first sunspots are being counted, tracked and characterized in near real-time (along with flares, coronal mass emissions and geomagnetic storms) by various institutions and talented citizen-scientists who use the free JHelioviewer app to produce remarkable graphics (that make clever use of the jpeg2000 spec) out of the many daily terabytes of incoming solar satellite data. Solar Cycle 25 is well underway though it is too soon to say if NCAR will outperform the NOAA/NASA ‘expert panel’.
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