A New Look at the Sun: Revisiting Old Datasets with New Tools

Abstract:

Science data must be treated carefully to make sure that it doesn't influence the scientific results. But when presenting videos and pictures of the Sun (and other imagery!) to the public, the goal is to communicate excitement and wonder, not just the science. Stunning visuals can be created by fine-tuning the presentation for impact rather than precision. These visuals can also reveal new directions for the research to proceed.

In this session I will present "realtime" videos of the Sun that have been tuned to draw out the extended structures of the solar atmosphere. These videos are hosted on my website, gilly.space, and are intended to be used in outreach scenarios, such as Planetarium shows, exhibits, lectures, computer desktop backgrounds, and more.

I welcome a broad range of discussion: on the technique used to produced the videos, the way I've implemented the webhosting and computation with Amazon Web Service and Github, ways in which this project can be disseminated to the public, other techniques people have used to make visuals, and insights people have found about data only after they took off their scientist hat and put on an artist's hat.