The European Space Agency and NASA have combined to make available free software that lets you look at the Sun in a completely new way.
‘JHelioviewer is new visualization software that enables everyone, anywhere to explore the Sun. Developed as part of the ESA/NASA Helioviewer Project, it provides a desktop program that enables users to call up images of the Sun from the past 15 years. More than a million images from SOHO can already be accessed, and new images from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory are being added every day.’
![JHV_Screenshot_SOHO_overlay2](http://nightskyonline.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/JHV_Screenshot_SOHO_overlay2-300x236.jpg)
‘Using this new software, users can create their own movies of the Sun, colour the images as they wish, and image-process the movies in real time. They can export their finished movies in various formats, and track features on the Sun by compensating for the solar rotation. However, the true power of the tool lies in its ability to allow cross-referencing of different aspects of the large data sets; many events observed on the Sun are interconnected and occur over vastly different temporal and spatial scales.’ Text from software website.
For further information, and to download the software go here.