The SunPy Project: Open Source Development and Status of the Version 1.0 Core Package

The goal of the SunPy project is to facilitate and promote the use and development of community-led, free, and open source data analysis software for solar physics based on the scientific Python environment. The project achieves this goal by developing and maintaining the sunpy core package and supporting an ecosystem of affiliated packages. This paper describes the first official stable release (version 1.0) of the core package, as well as the project organization and infrastructure. This paper concludes with a discussion of the future of the SunPy project

Hinode/XRT Diagnostics of Loop Thermal Structure

We investigate possible diagnostics of the thermal structure of coronal loops from Hinode/XRT observations made with several filters. We consider the observation of an active region with five filters. We study various possible combinations of filter data to optimize for sensitivity to thermal structure and for signal enhancement

Fine Thermal Structure of a Coronal Active Region

The determination of the fine thermal structure of the solar corona is fundamental to constraining the coronal heating mechanisms. The Hinode X-ray Telescope collected images of the solar corona in different passbands, thus providing temperature diagnostics through energy ratios. By combining different filters to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio, we observed a coronal active region in five filters, revealing a highly thermally structured corona: very fine structures in the core of the region and on a larger scale further away. We observed continuous thermal distribution along the coronal loops, as well as entangled structures, and variations of thermal structuring along the line of sight

aiapy: A Python Package for Analyzing Solar EUV Image Data from AIA

Summary: The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA; Lemen et al., 2012) instrument onboard the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO; Pesnell et al., 2012) spacecraft has observed the fulldisk of the Sun, nearly continuously, for the last ten years. It is one of three instruments on SDO, along with the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI; Schou et al., 2012) and the Extreme Ultraviolet Variability Experiment (EVE; Woods et al., 2012). With its high spatial (0.6 ′′ per pixel) and temporal (up to 12 seconds for most channels) resolution, AIA has greatly enhanced our understanding of our closest star in a number of different areas, including the initiation of flares and coronal mass ejections as well as the quiescent heating of the corona, the outermost layer of the Sun’s atmosphere. AIA is a narrowband imaging instrument comprised of four separate telescopes that collectively observe the full-disk of the Sun at ten different wavelengths: seven extreme ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths, two far UV wavelengths, and one visible wavelength. It produces nearly 60,000 images per day with a new 4K-by-4K image produced by each EUV channel every 12 seconds. The image data are provided to the community by the Joint Science Operations Center (JSOC) at Stanford University in the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS; Wells et al., 1981) format