Are you curious to see what an active solar storm or sunspots look like?  Helioviewer is an open-source visualization tool that makes it possible for everyone to explore images of the Sun and related solar features and events, over time.  This project, funded by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), enables searching and viewing images within the massive datasets obtained from 9 solar observatories.  Starting with images from September 1991, users can examine images from specific observation dates, moving at time increments as small as 1 second,  and overlay images along with adding notations of predetermined features and events. 

There are several export options available within Helioviewer (see box shown in Figure 2).  Users can generate a video of either the full screen or a selected portion along with a start and end date/time.  Users can then export to YouTube where a number of Helioviewer clips already exist.   Helioviewer also provides a button to easily download a screenshot of the window or request a sequence of images from the Virtual Solar Observatory.  Finally, the site provides shortcuts to sharing links to the current viewport over email or social media channels.

Advanced users, including scientists, will want to download JHelioviewer, a related software application for Windows/MacOS/Linux, that provides additional visualization capability.  A full description is detailed in the article Müller, D., et al. “JHelioviewer-Time-dependent 3D visualization of solar and heliospheric data.” Astronomy & Astrophysics 606 (2017): A10.

Sara Russell Gonzalez, Physical Sciences Librarian, University of Florida

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