NASA satellites capture hourly views of our sun that are then used by scientists to study solar phenomena. The Space Weather Viewer provides the same images to anyone with an Internet connection. Visitors to the Space Weather Viewer site can zoom in on current satellite images to see solar storms and sunspots and other activity on as it happens on our nearest star, the Sun.
In addition to near-real time images, the site provides illustrations, NASA mission info, video simulations, and scientist interviews to give visitors a range of information on the Sun and solar phenomena. All the videos are broadcast-quality and visitors can download copies of all the media to their local computers, as well as captions for each video.
The application scales the satellite images to fill the browser window. All of the menu items and controls can be hidden to further maximize the size of the images. The minimalist design deliberately fades into the background to allow visitors to focus their attention on the beautiful imagery that composes the interactive.
The Space Weather Viewer was developed using Adobe Flex. This open source platform allowed us to quickly create the interface. The zoom feature and captioning feature were built specifically for the application. Extensible markup language (XML) was used for descriptive text files and menus, so that all of the content on the site is external to the application, making it easy to alter or edit.
Ideum worked closely with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, representatives from NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and other NASA centers and missions to develop this interactive Website. Check out today’s Space Weather.
