Solar Weather Browser
Despite working with rather lowly equipment I've found myself getting more and more fascinated with solar observing — just the simple act of doing a sunspot count as often as I can has me rather enthralled.
This evening I was looking around the net for a source of sunspot numbers held in a sensible format1 with a view to writing a small tool that would auto-compare my counts with the "official" ones to see how well I was doing. During that search I stumbled on The Solar Weather Browser.
SWB is available for Windows, MacOS and various types of Unix (including GNU/Linux, of course) and it seems to be an amazing bit of software. Think of it as the solar equivalent of the Virtual Moon Atlas.
If anyone out there is interested in following what's going on on the Sun and they want a tool that lets them view it in all sorts of ways (with the ability to travel back in time too) then they they should give SWB a serious look.
File Under: Sun, Sunspots, Solar Observing, Astronomy Software, Solar Weather Browser.
1 I'm still looking. I've got one or two candidates but a source that publishes an RSS feed or some other form in XML would be really handy.
1 comment:
Hi Dave,
thanks for the publicity for the SWB and for the SIDC :-). I am ready to enter in discussion with you on how to distribute our sunspot data in XML format or through RSS feed. Please contact me at david AT sidc.be.
Thanks,
David
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