What you're stuck on, and which tool gets you unstuck
Every need a solar scientist, student or Sun fan brings to the suite, in the order the work happens: find the data, look at it, work with it, make something, share it. Dashed cards are approved but not built yet. Cards with a grey edge are planned utilities that will fold into an existing product rather than ship on their own.
Find it
The empty seat today. Heliad fills it.
Search by time, instrument and wavelength; queue downloads from the archives and resume them when the connection drops.
One library with one folder convention, checksums verified on arrival, duplicates caught.
Watch a source or a folder; new files land in the library and get indexed.
Headers and WCS are checked as files arrive: rotation keys that disagree, the wrong time scale, a solar radius that doesn't match the plate scale.
A read-only status pane showing installed and latest versions from the family release feed. Each app still updates itself through its own channel.
Look at it
Seconds, on a file you already have.
Finder thumbnails render every FITS file as the Sun, in the instrument's colormap.
Press Space for a Quick Look preview with real coordinates; search the metadata in Spotlight.
Drop the file on a web page. It renders in your browser; nothing uploads and there's no account.
Inline previews where you already work.
Header dump, render and contact sheets from the command line, ready for a Makefile.
Work with it
Sit down with a series and follow the physics.
Layers, timelines and movies for coronagraph and wide-field data such as PUNCH, SOHO/LASCO and PROBA-3/ASPIICS.
Studio aligns and differences layers across instruments. Heliad blinks two files in your library side by side.
One call in sunkit-image brings out faint structure on the disk and off the limb, with no tuning. A visualization, not a calibrated radiance.
Make something
From a good look to a figure you can submit.
WCS axes, a colorbar with honest limits, limb and scale bar, sized to a journal column. One panel from Studio or Quick Look; a batch of panels from a Heliad selection.
Share the Sun
Imagery to look at, show off and hang up.
The last 48 hours of the Sun as your desktop picture, screen saver or a wall of video. macOS.
Near-real-time SDO/AIA views on a web page, updated every 20 minutes, with a 48-hour timelapse for every channel.
The same clips on a living-room or lobby screen.
Today's Sun as a widget and on the lock screen.
Paste one snippet and the 48-hour Sun plays on your page, with credit and a link back.
Pick a date and a wavelength, Original or Enhanced, and order a print at myheliograph.com.
The tools
Everything on this page, available now or on the way.
HelioFITS
Quick Look previews, Finder thumbnails, Spotlight metadata and a viewer window.
HelioFITS Studio
Layers, timelines, alignment and movies for the coronagraphs and wide-field imagers.
RHEF
The Radial Histogram Equalizing Filter: faint corona, in one line of Python.
Heliad
Find solar data, download it and keep it in one library.