The Helioviewer Project: Solar and Heliospheric Data Visualization

Helioviewer.org enables the simultaneous exploration of multiple heterogeneous solar and heliospheric data sets. The latest iteration of this open-source web application brings significant visual and functional enhancements to the user interface. Long overdue from a usability perspective, these changes also pave the way for significant new capabilities planned for the future. Emphasis is placed on the solar imagery, which is now always displayed full-screen. Controls for selecting image layers, feature and event annotations, and observation date and time are presented in a light-weight overlay with individually collapsible sub-sections. Secondary functions such as movie and screenshot generation, link and image sharing, news and community videos are now intuitively grouped and kept out of the way until needed. Tight integration with external services such as the Virtual Solar Observatory and SDO Cut-out Service allows scientists to issue precisely defined requests to download science data sets via the web, SolarSoft/IDL, and SunPy/Python after definining and previewing them visually. Finally, documentation of the Helioviewer Public API has been enhanced and expanded, making it simpler to integrate Helioviewer data into scientific workflows.