As the sun reawakens from an anomalously quiet period, keep track of solar flares, sunspots and coronal mass ejections with a new iPhone app that puts the real-time status of the sun in your hand.
"This is more than cool," Dick Fisher, director of NASA's Heliophysics Division, said in a press release. "It's transformative. For the first time ever, we can monitor the sun as a living, breathing 3-dimensional sphere."
With the free 3D Sun app, you can set your phone to alert you when a new solar flare erupts, watch video of a solar prominence or a comet heading into the sun. You can manipulate an image of the sun in three-dimensions with your finger.
The data is streamed to Earth by NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft which monitor the sun from two different spots, one ahead of Earth in its orbit and one behind, giving stereoscopic images to give a sort of three-dimensional view, similar to the way our two eyes do.
The pair cover 87 percent of the sun's surface, effectively giving us a view of the "dark side" of the sun. This means anyone can see on their phone parts of the sun that even the most powerful telescopes on Earth can't see.
The STEREO spacecraft watch the extreme untraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum because the most exciting solar phenomena show up best at these wavelengths.
"That's why the 3D sun looks false-color green," said STEREO program scientist Lika Guhathakurta in a press release. "These are not white-light images."
The app was built by a team of programmers led by Tony Phillips, editor of . The team plans to release 3D Sun 2.0 which will have higher-res images and data from more wavelengths.
This is the second free iPhone app NASA has released recently. NASA's first app brings you loads of space photos from the Hubble Space Telescope and other NASA missions, videos from NASA TV of science updates, mission activity, rocket launches and other events, mission status updates and live countdowns clocks. And you can track the International Space Station as well.
See Also:
- 3-D Solar Tsunami Video Shows the Extreme Waves Are Real
- Big Solar Flare Portends Sun's Return to Normal
- First View of the Dark Side of the Sun
- Slick NASA iPhone App Puts Space in Your Pocket
- iPhone App Finds Disease Outbreaks Near You
- 22 iPhone Apps for Science Geeks
- Use Your iPhone to Help Scientists Track Crickets in NYCFollow us on Twitter @betsymason and @wiredscience, and on Facebook.
