Solar Jet Hunter has launched in December 2021 and thousands of volunteers have participated, spotting and boxing solar jets – and thank to these amazing solar jet hunters, we produced our first catalogue of solar jets (more on this is a blog post soon!).
However, we still have data to analyze! While Solar Jet Hunter was on a break for a few months, the science team and the Zooniverse team were working on a new version of the project, and in particular, on the “video tool”. The goal was to develop the tools enabling the annotation of the subjects in a video format. We are delighted to launch now this new version of Solar Jet Hunter, and to explain what changed here!
Why do we need video tools?
Solar jets are ejections of material from the Sun, and to really see if something is being ejected, one need to see movement! That’s why in Solar Jet Hunter, the data should be shown to volunteers in the form of movies.
Clik here to view.
Examples of jets in data showed to the volunteers in Solar Jet Hunter
One subtlety is that we ask volunteers to annotate the movies: we ask them to mark points and draw rectangles on the data. Behind the scenes, a software is needed to make the annotation possible on data in a video format (mp4) and to interpret the annotations of the volunteers. That functionality was not entirely ready in 2021.
What we did then, was showing images (png) in a sequence, with the possibility of playing the sequence of images as a movie. We called this a “movie strip”. This way, we could see the motions in the data and spot jets, and make annotations on images, since this was possible in Zooniverse at the time.
What is changed in this new version of Solar Jet Hunter?
In the movie strips, we were limited in the number of frames (images) in each movie: we found out during a beta-test that 15 frames was a reasonable number. In a “real” video, there are a lot more frames! Having a lot of frames is good because we can then produce longer movies and see the evolution of the solar features on longer times – In principle, longer movies will help the volunteers in deciding on what is a jet and what is not a jet!
Additionally, Zooniverse projects are moving to a new look, so the website may look different if you’ve participated in the project before – but all your favourite sections are there: the workflows, the field guide, the additional information on the project in the “About” section, and the talk board.
What data sets will be analyzed now?
We populated this new version of the project with observations of the sun taken between 2017 and 2018. The data analyzed is coming from the NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory, who is still operating, so we will continue to populate the project with newer data as we go!
This represents more than 700 movies to look at to find and annotate jets, so we need your help! Join the hunt for solar jets!
