Welcome
JHelioviewer is a visualization tool for JPEG2000 images and movies. It can be launched directly from your web browser as a Java Web Start application:
Give it a try and let us know what you think! When you launch JHelioviewer for the first time, the application will be downloaded to your computer. After that, any time you launch JHelioviewer from this page, it will start your local application right away. If updates are available, they will automatically be downloaded. Alternatively, you can download a signed JAR file here:
Getting started
JHelioviewer makes it easy to explore the Sun! When you launch JHelioviewer, a sample image is loaded right away. Simply select a time range and instrument in the observation panel to access more images or to generate a movie. So far (June 08, 2009), all SOHO images from 2003 are available. You can also download some of our test images and animations. If you find a bug, please report it here.
Project Summary
JHelioviewer is a visualization tool for solar physics data based on the JPEG 2000 image compression standard. JPEG 2000 offers many useful new features and has the potential to revolutionize the way high-resolution image data are disseminated and analyzed. Using JPEG 2000, we can serve data to a client in highly compressed, quality progressive, and region-of-interest based form. These features make it possible to minimize the data transmitted while maximizing the use of the data that is transmitted. This is especially relevant for solar physics since NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory will soon provide more than a terabyte of image data per day. Providing efficient access to such large data volumes at both high spatial and high time resolution is of paramount importance to support scientific discovery.