Guide

When producing synoptic maps of the Sun, there are typically 3 steps involved:

Source the desired images, in their original Helioprojective coordinate system.
Reproject each image into a map projection that spans the full solar surface.
Add the images together to cover a large fraction of the solar surface

solarsynoptic breaks these tasks down into three sub-modules:

solarsynoptic.data
solarsynoptic.reprojection
solarsynoptic.combine

Fetching data

solarsynoptic.data contains a couple of helper functions for downloading AIA and STEREO maps from the beginning of a given day. For recent dates they automatically handle getting a near-real-time image when a final archived image isn’t yet available.

Functions

`aia_start_of_day_map`(dtime, wlen[, dl_path])	Download and load the first AIA map available on a given date at a given wavelength.
`stereo_start_of_day_map`(dtime[, wlen, dl_path])	Download and load the first STEREO EUVI map available on a given date at a given wavelength.

Reprojecting data

solarsynoptic.reprojection contains a single function to reproject maps into a Carrington coordinate frame.

Functions

reproject_carrington(smap, shape_out[, ...])

Reproject smap into a Carrington frame of reference.

Caching reprojected maps

Under the hood solarsynoptic can cache the reprojected map to a file on disk, which avoids having to run the reprojection routine each time the reprojected map is requested. This is enabled by default, and can be disabled by passing cache=False to reproject_carrington. The cached maps are saved in a folder named solarsynoptic that is placed next to the sunpy data directory.

Combining multiple maps

Functions

`coadd`(smaps[, weight_function])	Add a set of full Sun maps together.
`weights_longitude`(width)	Weights to use when adding synoptic maps.