Softpedia Award

JHelioviewer

JHelioviewer lets you visualize solar image data and JPEG 2000 content in general. Explore 14 years worth of images from SOHO and create your own movies of the Sun. Try it and let us know what you think!

Click to download JHelioviewer

Updated on April 13 2010 (JHelioviewer 2.0.4, revision 131).

Getting started

  • Go to the download page and get the right package.
  • The first time you start JHelioviewer, it will download several platform-dependent libraries, which will take a moment.
  • Now you are ready to go: Simply use the observation panel to access 14 years worth of SOHO data.
  • If you find a bug, please report it here. JHelioviewer is open source - share and enjoy!

Project Summary

JHelioviewer is a visualization software for solar image 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. The JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol, JPIP, enables us to serve data in highly compressed, quality progressive, region-of-interest based form. These features make it possible to minimize the data volume transmitted while maximizing its usability. This is especially relevant for solar physics since NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is providing more than a terabyte of image data per day. Providing efficient access to this huge data volume at both high spatial and high time resolution is of paramount importance to support scientific discovery.

Download the JHelioviewer paper (published in Computing in Science & Engineering 2009).