The Helioviewer Project: Making Petabytes of Images Available to Everyone
Abstract
The aim of the Helioviewer Project (supported by ESA and NASA) is to design services and clients which give users everywhere the capability to browse and visualize the behavior of the Sun and inner heliosphere and to give access to the underlying science data. Helioviewer Project services and clients allow users to explore archives of JPEG2000 files and easily create movies of heliospheric events at arbitrary times, locations, time-scales and length-scales, using
images from multiple instruments, overlaid using the FITS header information from the original science data. Images from early 1996 to the present day are currently available. This presentation will begin with a short summary of the JPEG2000 standard, which is used to store a wavelet-compressed version of the original science image data and a full copy of the FITS header. This reduces storage requirements server-side when compared to the original science data, but also keeps important meta-data available for use by browse clients. The JPEG2000 standard also includes the JPEG2000 Internet Protocol (JPIP), which allows browse clients to efficiently stream images and dynamically assembled movies over the web by sending only the wavelet coefficients required to show the desired portion of the movie. These features enable efficient access to large archives of large images, such those created by the Advanced Imaging Assembly. Current use of Helioviewer Project services and clients will be discussed. Plans for including images from other solar and heliospheric data-sets will also be discussed. Finally, I will outline the future integration of Helioviewer Project visualization capabilities with the data provision services of the Virtual Solar Observatory (VSO) and the solar phenomena catalog services of the Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK), to create more scientifically useful and integrated data search, browse and acquisition tools.- Publication:
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American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #220
- Pub Date:
- May 2012
- Bibcode:
- 2012AAS...22032301I