Solar Observations Among Latest GigaPan Time Machine Releases

Byron SpiceThursday, November 17, 2011

The Robotics Institute's GigaPan Time Machine project has released eight new data sets, including a 24-hour observation of the sun by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft. Like previous Time Machines, the dynamic imagery can be explored interactively across both time and space. Read Scientific American's story.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory data also can be explored at different wavelengths, which correspond to different energy levels. Other data sets include more space observations- ocean chlorophyll concentrations and the color of the Earth's surface as documented by NASA's Aqua MODIS satellites. Other data sets are a one-week mosaic of NOAA weather radar for the continental United States, a diseased bee colony, the response of Arizona grasslands to rainfall, kayakers at The Point in Pittsburgh and the 2011 Burning Man event in Nevada's Black Rock Desert.

The GigaPan Time Machine system is an extension of GigaPan technology developed by the CREATE Lab and NASA, which can capture a mosaic of hundreds or thousands of digital pictures and stitch those frames into a panorama that be interactively explored via computer. To extend GigaPan into the time dimension, image mosaics are repeatedly captured at set intervals, and then stitched across both space and time to create a video in which each frame can be hundreds of millions, or even billions of pixels.

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Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.edu