From the Sun
With CherryPy and Python Remote Objects, you can run displays showing data from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft.
Use Python to retrieve and display images from space
Lead Image © dzm1try, 123RF.com
At the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History [1], Raspberry Pis are used to help provide a near-real-time look at the Sun. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) [2] transmits images to Earth continuously 24 hours a day. Once these images arrive on Earth, NASA makes them available on web servers accessible to anyone [3]. In this article, I'll show how a combination of Python programs makes these images available daily.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory
SDO's mission is to study radiation emitted from the sun and how it affects life on Earth. It does this by collecting images in 13 different wavelengths with two different instruments (Figure 1).
The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) comprises four telescopes with two passbands each, generating eight images every 10 seconds. The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) watches waves on the surface of the sun; its magnetic imaging looks inside the sun and returns images that look almost like weather radar. These images, combined with their download frequency, generate 1.5TB of data each day.
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