Solar Movie Maker

1. Introduction

The Solar Movie Maker is an application that reads in solar images and combines them into an mpeg movie. It can make movies of images from SOHO/EIT, SOHO/CDS, SOHO/MDI, TRACE and Yohkoh SXT. The application calls routines from Solarsoft IDL.

This application can be invoked via VODesktop or through Python scripting. It can be used to make a movie of datafiles that a user has already downloaded, or it can be part of a workflow that queries a database of solar images, retrieves the data, and makes a movie of the images.

2. Python script for getting data and running Solar Movie Maker

The python script below will send a query to a database of solar observations and retrieve a list of files within the time range specified. It will then pass this list (in VOTable format) to the Solar Movie Maker application that will generate the movie.

Download the script: solar_movie.py

To run the script, you will need the Astrogrid python module installed on your computer (see the download page here and instructions on how to install the python module here). You will also need to have the Astrogrid VODesktop running at the time when you launch the script. Follow this link for help in downloading and running up VODesktop.

To run the script, in a command terminal, type in:

    python solar_movie.py

You can edit the .py file to change the time range for the movie and the instrument name (Note that there is a limit to the number of images that can be made into a movie).

The script will produce as output an mpeg movie of the images, and a log file containing messages from the running of the IDL routines and any error messages. These outputs will be downloaded from VOSpace to the directory where you are running the movie.

3. Python script for running Solar Movie Maker on data already downloaded

If you have a set of solar images that you want to combine into a movie, you need first to place them in a location where they can be accessed by the application, that is you need to either upload them into your VOSpace or place them in a location that can be accessed by the outside world, for example in a directory like: http://www.mygroup.ac.uk/~myuser/solardata/ . The Solar Movie Maker will download the images from the location that you specify in order to make a movie.

Secondly you need to place a list of the location of the files into a text file, eg filelist.txt. This file should look as follows:

    http://www.mygroup.ac.uk/~myuser/solardata/image1.fits
    http://www.mygroup.ac.uk/~myuser/solardata/image2.fits
    http://www.mygroup.ac.uk/~myuser/solardata/image3.fits

The text file with list should also be accessible, eg place it in the same directory: "http://www.mygroup.ac.uk/~myuser/solardata/"

Download the script: solar_movie_txtinp.py

4. Usage notes

TRACE data are archived in hourly files (also called 'tri' files). At present the movie maker produces TRACE movies of minimum duration 1 hour.