Richard Morton

Wave analysis tools - Nature Reviews Methods Primers Waves are ubiquitous in nature and occur across various scales and settings. In this Primer, Jafarzadeh et al. discuss techniques for preprocessing and analysing waves, including information on choosi...

Waves are everywhere around us. From the sub-nano scale of atoms to the vastness of the universe, we receive signals that are superpositions of waves.

This week's #Primer unveils the intricacies of wave #AnalysisTools shining a light on the best practices for #signalProcessing
Check it out!
📖👇

The SOLARNET Virtual Observatory, or SVO in short, collects metadata from as many solar observations as possible, especially those involved in the SOLARNET projects, in a common catalog and make them available to the scientific community.

Benjamin Mampaey, Véronique Delouille, Robbe Vansintjan (@orb-ksb.bsky.social). The SOLARNET Virtual Observatory: An Effective Way to Search Solar Datasets and Cross-Search with Solar Events. #SolarPhysics 300, 16 (2025) doi.org/10.1007/s112...
Part of collection The Many Scales of the Magnetic Sun

Bernard Fleck has told me the story of that day. Sounded like an intense experience for everyone there!

PhD Search FindAPhD. Search Funded PhD Projects, Programmes & Scholarships. Search for PhD funding, scholarships & studentships in the UK, Europe and around the world.

[Final Reminder, since deadlines a few days away!] There are multiple fully-funded #PhDposition studentships in #STFC @ukri.org frontier science #phdpositions #AI #solarphysics
#spacephysics #astronomy #heliophysics

All 8 advertised on www.findaphd.com/phds/?Keywor... and I will re-post them now…

Great news! I bet it’s going to be nervous and exciting few days for you and the team.

As many have pointed out, the LASCO images on the SOHO website are saturated. So this is the result of my own algo for processing them.

And I will echo my sentiments from yesterday: This. Comet. Is. RIDICULOUS! 🤩😍 ☄️🔭☀️

I will also (soon) post a link to a Jupyter notebook which contains an example Cryo-NIRSP spectrum and the fitting routines for those interested.

I made use of a package called JAX, which is primarily for Deep Learning but can speed up optimsation problems. Well worth checking out.

13/13

In the next post in this series, I will delve into the results in more detail. I will give a glimpse of some of the science possible with Cryo-NIRSP, with a focus on waves in the corona.

12/n

Results from modelling the Cryo-NIRSP spectrum.

The modelling results are excellent! The data is fit extremely well which means we can extract the details of the coronal line profile (in purple).

While maybe not that exciting by itself, once we repeat this for all the spectra in the data set (over 6 million!), we get some fantastic results.
11/n

Coronagraphic observations of Si X 1430 nm acquired by DKIST/Cryo-NIRSP with methods for telluric absorption correction We report commissioning observations of the Si X 1430 nm solar coronal line observed coronagraphically with the Cryogenic Near-Infrared Spectropolarimeter (Cryo-NIRSP) at the National Science Foundati...

To get the infromation we want, we have to model the spectrum and extract the coronal profile. This is technical, and for those brave of heart, described in Schad et al. 2024 arxiv.org/abs/2402.09632

10/n

Locations of photspheric spectral lines in the infrared.

The dips at different wavelengths (and even where the coronal line is) are due to scattered photospheric light and absoprtion by water in the Eath's atmosphere.

Here I indicate locations of the photospheric lines and their potential source. These lines are taken from a modelled spectral atlas.

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An example specturm from Cryo-NIRSP showing the coronal emission line.

Turns out the corona was there after all! The bright strip near 1074.7 nm is a coronal emission line (Iron XIII).

The details are best seen by plotting an individual spectrum. The coronal line is indicated by the arrow.

There is lots of other information in the spectrum, not all of it wanted!
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Images of single exposures from the Cryo-NIRSP instrument showing intenisty as a function of wavelength and location along the slit.

Cryo-NIRSP is a slit-based spectropolarimeter, so we only get a narrow band across a fraction of the Sun (shown by red line in previous part of post).

Hence, each data file contains the results of a slit exposure, so is wavelength verus slit location. There are two beams, so two similar images.
7/n

Image from Solar Dynamics Observatory showing the corona in EUV emission. Also shows the DKIST field of view.

GOES SUVI image of the Sun's corona.

The first step was to provide some context for the Cryo-NIRSP data. I used data from NASA's SDO and GOES SUVI, plotting the expected location that DKIST was observing over the top.

Cryo-NIRSP observed an open field region, catching an active region and a streamer base on either edge.

6/n

I forgot about the data while the Cryo-NIRSP science team did initial processing. And 3 months later I was sent the data files. With trepidiation I dove in!

5/n

An image showing raw spectra from an observation of the Sun.

I then recieved the email saying the data had been taken 🥳

The team attached an image of the data, reporting they could see the corona....

My honest first reaction was 'What the hell?!?' 🤨

I didn't know what to make of it. I am used to working with pretty images, so felt a bit morose 😢 😂
4/n

I was fortunate to have a proposal accepted in the 2nd Observing Cycle. Needless to say, I was ecstatic 😁

It was a long 9 month wait until the data was actually taken. But the DKIST team were great at keeping me informed of preparations and discussed the details of implementing my proposal.
3/n

Getting access to Cryo-NIRSP data suitable for your science goals requires submitting a proposal during one of the dedicated calls. From what I can tell, this has been well subscribed, showing a great community interest in DKIST.

Existing gata can be accessed by the DKIST data center.
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Late last year I started a series of posts on science with DKIST Cryo-NIRSP. In this post I discuss my initial experiences of working with the data and show some of its features.

This should nicely lead into the new science posts I am planning in the next few weeks.

1/n

☀️🧪

First Solar Images from Sunrise III The balloon-borne solar observatory Sunrise III captured images of the Sun with highest resolution in July of this year during its six-and-a-half-day stratospheric flight. The team has published the f...

🧪☀️🔭
www.mps.mpg.de/first-solar-...

YouTube video by WebsEdge Science The Never-Before-Seen Sun – Sun Coronal Ejection Tracker (SunCET)

Congratulations to my colleagues James Mason, Dan Seaton, Cristina Kay, Amal Chandran, and Aaron Magner on a phenomenal video on the phenomenal #CubeSat mission #SunCET! Very nice bit of science outreach at #AGU2024! ☀️🧪🛰️🔭🎢

GitHub - Richardjmorton/Solar_atlas Contribute to Richardjmorton/Solar_atlas development by creating an account on GitHub.

If you want to play with the solar spectral atlas, I have prepared a short Python notebook on how to do this: github.com/Richardjmort...

If you want to know more about Cryo-NIRSP, the instrument paper is at rdcu.be/d2WnH

The first results are given in a paper by Tom Schad: iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

What makes Cyro-NIRSP special is it can measure spectra fast (every 1s), with a high sensitivity, and a great spectral and spatial resolution. This combination opens up lots of opportunities that previous instruments could not!

In the next (extended) post I will talk about the data itself.

A picture of the Cryo-NIRSP instrument. Courtesy NSO.

Cryo-NIRSP is a type of spectrometer. Its focus is on measuring coronal spectral lines that are found in the infrared.

It provides multiple spectra at different positions along a slit, so can focus only on a narrow strip of the Sun at any one time.

There are a range of instruments for studying the Sun but they fall in to two broad categories:
- Imagers: Counts up the photons over a certain wavelength range. Not so bothered about the line's details.

- Spectrometers: Counts photons at different wavelengths to accurately measure the lines.

A plot of the hydrogen alpha absorption line.

A picture of chromosphere taken with the Dutch Open Telescope. Courtesy R. Rutten.

The plot shows the Hydrogen alpha absorption line from the spectrum. Note scale is only 1 nm! This line is formed in the chromosphere.

Maybe not so impressive by itself. The image shows what the Sun looks like if we only look at light from this line. Beautiful! You can see a sunspot and filaments.

At certain wavelengths there is either more or less light than the blackbody. This is largely due to the Sun's atmosphere, which contains elements that do the absorbing or emitting.

The solar spectrum generally follows a Planck function (B -shown in purple). This is because the photons are created in the Sun's core and reach a near-blackbody state before they leave through the surface.

The Sun's spectrum is a lot more interesting than a blackbody though.

An plot of the sun's electromagnetic spectrum with the Planck function over plotted.

I am starting with some basics, so hopefully everyone can follow along.

The Sun emits light across a range of wavelengths. Most of the light is in the optical part of the spectrum, wavelengths of 400 nm to 800 nm, shown in the picture of the Solar Irradiance.