About Us

Welcome to SolarMonitor.org, hosted and developed by a team of researchers within the Solar Physics Group at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. These pages contain near-realtime and archived images, timeseries data and other information on active regions and solar activity.

Launched in 2001, SolarMonitor has undergone numerous frontend and backend redesigns. Due to the websites extensive history the IDL source code became outdated and thus increasingly difficult to maintain. In 2020 the Python redevelopment of old SolarMonitor from the ground up began.

This site is a work in progress, with new features and data sources are added regularly. Feedback can be provided by posting an issue to our github issue tracker, by emailing the SolarMonitor Team, or by tweeting us @solarmonitororg.

Our Team

Peter Gallagher

P.I.

Senior Professor & Head of Astronomy & Astrophysics Section, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studied (DIAS)

Alasdair Wilson

Developer

Research Software Engineer, University of Oxford

Shane Maloney

Developer

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studied (DIAS)

Sophie Murray

Developer

Technical Officer, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studied (DIAS)

David Connolly

Developer

Undergraduate Student in Physics and Data Science

Imogen Nagle

Developer

Undergraduate Student in Physics

Paul Wright

Developer

Post-doctoral Research Fellow, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studied (DIAS)

Alumni

Eoin Carley

Ruth Moore

Oscar O'Hara

Aoife McCloskey

Iain Billett

Simon Free

David O'Callaghan

David Pérez-Suárez

D. Shaun Bloomfield

R. T. James McAteer

Donna Rogers-Lee

Russell J. Hewett

Acknowledgments

It would be appreciated if publications based on data downloaded from these pages would acknowledge SolarMonitor.org and the relevant initial data source listed below. Suggested acknowledgement: "Data supplied courtesy of SolarMonitor".

Data

NOAA Solar Region Summaries, Solar Event Lists, GOES X-rays, proton and electron data from the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center.
SDO Data supplied courtesy of the SDO/HMI and SDO/AIA consortia. SDO is the first mission to be launched for NASA's Living With a Star (LWS) Program.
SUVI data are supplied by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI).
STIX data are provided by Solar Orbiter, a space mission of international collaboration between ESA and NASA, operated by ESA

Software

SolarMonitor makes extensive use of open-source software packages:

Sunpy is a community-developed, free and open-source solar data analysis environment for Python. SolarMonitor makes use of Sunpy, and Sunpy affiliated packages, for plotting and data retrieval.
SolarMonitor makes use of Astropy: a community-developed core Python package and an ecosystem of tools and resources for astronomy