Helioviewer: Simplifying Your Access to SDO Data

Over the past several years, the Helioviewer Project has evolved from a simple web application to display images of the sun into a suite of tools to visualize and interact with heterogeneous types of solar data. In addition to a modular and scalable back-end server, the Helioviewer Project now offers multiple browse clients; the original web application has been upgraded to support high-definition movie generation and feature and event overlays. For complex image processing and massive data volumes, there is a stand-alone desktop application, JHelioviewer. For a quick check of the latest images and events, there is an iPhone application, hqTouch. The project has expanded from the original SOHO images to include image data from SDO and event and feature data from the HEK. We are working on adding additional image data from other missions as well as spectral and time-series data. We will discuss the procedure through which interested parties may process their data for use with Helioviewer, including how to use JP2Gen to convert FITS files into Helioviewer-compliant JPEG 2000 images, how to setup a local instance of the Helioviewer server, and how to query Helioviewer in your own applications using a simple web API.