Solar

Automating SUVI YouTube

Intro The Sun is changing all the time. In order to identify interesting new events to study, a solar physicist must monitor data streams observing the Sun on a regular basis. I thought it might be neat to make a tool that would automatically download extreme ultraviolet images of the Sun from the GOES-R SUVI instrument and then upload them as a movie to YouTube for easy monitoring. My goal was to use Prefect to run the entire process on a schedule.

January 22, 2023 Read

AIA temporal coloring

Temporal coloring I downloaded a few hours of AIA data in 171 Angstroms for another project. (For the non-solar people, AIA is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly aboard NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. It takes pictures of the Sun in extreme ultraviolet.) I started playing around with it, and I ended up making the hypnotic and enchanting, at least in my opinion, video at the end of this post. It was a simple process.

June 3, 2022 Read

SUVI calendar heatmap

Introduction The Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) aboard NOAA’s GOES takes pictures of the Sun in 6 ultraviolet passbands. They’re quite stunning and are used for space weather monitoring and prediction. (I was lucky enough to get to work with them in my previous job at NOAA.) To make them more useful, the imager takes long and short length exposures and then composites them together as a Level 2 composite image product.

May 20, 2022 Read

EUI Artifact Analysis

Introduction The Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) aboard the ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter mission takes pictures of the Sun in ultraviolet wavelengths. Above you can see an annotated version of one of these images. Specifically this is the image with filename solo_L1_eui-fsi174-image_20210224T013042238_V02.fits. Notice the artifacts where above and below the solar disk there are darkened stripes. It’s my understanding from a colleague that the cause of these stripes is unknown and they still need to be corrected in the data.

April 1, 2022 Read

Paper published: Real-time solar image classification: Assessing spectral, pixel-based approaches

This was my first first-author paper! It talks about doing semantic segmentation on the Sun. Here’s the link.

November 16, 2019 Read

Generate Thematic Maps from Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase

The below script will allow you to generate thematic maps from the valuable Heliophysics Event Knowledgebase (HEK). I have written it to take a SUVI thematic map as input and output only Spatial Possibilistic Clustering Algorithm (SPoCA) coronal hole and bright region patches in HEK but would be willing to help assist others to modify the script as needed. Expert labeled map SPoCA map from HEK The script can be found below and bundled with smachy, my solar image segmentation toolkit.

February 25, 2019 Read