Skip to content

See Our Sun

Jump to bottom
Mike Caprio edited this page Mar 6, 2019 · 17 revisions

Use Collected Image Data to Create Projection Maps of the Sun in OpenSpace

Hackathon Findings

  • tk

Hackathon Projects

Background

Please note: It is HIGHLY recommended that you download OpenSpace, install it, and play with it prior to coming to the hackathon. For this challenge you will need a special build of the software which enables solar browsing (linked below). OpenSpace is beta software, and it may take some time for you to get it running on your laptop. Save that time and do it before the hackathon! You can get support at the official OpenSpace Slack channel, see Resources at the bottom of this page.

We couldn't have a hackathon called "Hack The Solar System" without having a challenge centered on the literal star of our solar system: good old Sol!

Our sun is a yellow dwarf (one of billions just like it in our galaxy) and is located about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way, a hot ball of glowing gases burning at 15 million degrees Celsius at the heart of our solar system. It generates great amounts of gravity, energy, and heat and those forces can be felt to some degree all throughout the roughly 100,000 AU (astronomical units, where 1 AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun) diameter to the farthest reaches of our solar system.

You've probably heard that you can't look directly at the Sun with the naked eye, even during a solar eclipse! But now thanks to imagery from NASA's SOHO, STEREO and SDO satellites we can see what we've been missing. The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in particular is taking imagery of the Sun in multiple wavelengths all day long. This beautiful imagery is even more amazing when viewed over time (as can be seen in their daily movies).

SDO AIA 131 SDO AIA 131 Image

What Is OpenSpace?

OpenSpace is free and open source interactive data visualization software designed to visualize the entire known universe and portray our ongoing efforts to investigate the cosmos. It contains the entire AMNH Digital Universe dataset, and dynamically fetches the latest data from myriad sources online every time it starts up.

Funded in part by NASA, OpenSpace brings the latest techniques from data visualization research to the general public. The software supports interactive presentation of dynamic data from observations, simulations, and space mission planning and operations. OpenSpace works on multiple operating systems, with an extensible architecture powering high resolution tiled displays and planetarium domes, and makes use of the latest graphic card technologies for rapid data throughput. In addition, OpenSpace enables simultaneous networked connections across the globe, creating opportunity for shared experiences among audiences worldwide. The OpenSpace project is led by the Science Visualization Group and Hayden Planetarium at AMNH in collaboration with dozens of institutions all across the globe, including top computational visualization groups at Linköping University in Sweden and University of Utah.

As noted above and below, we HIGHLY recommend that you download, install, and play with OpenSpace well before you come to attend the hackathon. You will save tons of time with setup and configuration that could otherwise be wasted during the short amount of time we have at the event.

OpenSpace is funded in part by NASA under award No NNX16AB93A. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

OpenSpace is also funded in part by the Knut & Alice Wallenberg Foundation in Sweden and the Swedish e-Science Research Centre.

Solutions

Using OpenSpace's SolarBrowsing module your challenge is to develop an interface and/or pipeline for bringing solar imagery into OpenSpace. Your tasks will include obtaining data from the Helioview API, creating associated metadata for OpenSpace to read it, and triggering OpenSpace to show the data.

Some possible solutions may include:

  • Solar browsing interface in OpenSpace. Create an Interface (or update existing interface) to download imagery on demand and feed it into OpenSpace's solar browsing module.

  • Imagery collection scripts. Some utilities for fetching imagery and metadata from the SDO website.

Resources

Datasets

Challenge owner: Micah Acinapura

Challenges --|-- Online Resources And Data Sets --|-- Code of Conduct --|-- Home

Challenges

Online Resources And Data Sets

Museum Stakeholders

Home

Clone this wiki locally