Builds the honest Sun-tab artifacts for Phase 10 from free, public-domain
sources. See docs/SUN_DATA_SOURCES.md and
docs/SUN_PHYSICS.md for the full source, license,
CORS, and methodology record.
Space weather is the project's one genuine forecasting domain: NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) issues real operational forecasts. This pipeline visualizes SWPC's measurements and forecasts and attributes them to SWPC — it never makes its own space-weather forecast.
Produces two committed fallback files:
public/data/sun/spaceweather.json— current-ish solar wind, planetary Kp series, OVATION aurora summary (FORECAST), GOES X-ray + latest flare, F10.7, sunspot number, and Cycle-25 context.public/data/sun/solar_cycle.json— monthly sunspot / F10.7 history + SWPC's predicted Cycle-25 curve.
These are a SNAPSHOT. Every SWPC endpoint returns
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * (verified), so the frontend fetches SWPC
live, client-side (like Open-Meteo on Earth); the committed JSON is the
offline / first-paint / rate-limit fallback (is_snapshot: true,
live_fetch_recommended: true).
- Provider: NOAA SWPC,
https://services.swpc.noaa.gov/. - License: U.S. Government work, public domain (17 U.S.C. § 105). No key.
- SILSO note: the International Sunspot Number in SWPC's solar-cycle file
originates from WDC-SILSO (Royal Observatory of Belgium), whose own files are
CC BY-NC 4.0 (rejected). We ship NOAA's own count (
observed_swpc_ssn, public domain) as the primary series and carry ISN only as a flagged reference from NOAA's public-domain redistribution.
- MEASURED: solar wind (DSCOVR/ACE), Kp, GOES X-ray/flares, SSN, F10.7.
- FORECAST (SWPC's): OVATION aurora, predicted solar cycle.
- COMPUTED (ours): aurora activity word + oval latitude from measured Kp (coarse, labeled), solar-cycle phase.
python scripts/sun/fetch_spaceweather.py --outdir public/data/sun
# --kp-hours 72 hours of 3-hourly Kp series to keep
# --cycle-context-since 1976-01 historical SSN backdrop start (YYYY-MM)Stdlib urllib only (requests optional). Non-zero exit on failure. Verified
output 2026-07-18: solar wind ~323 km/s / Bz +3.4 nT, Kp 1.33 (quiet), X-ray
B6.8 (max flare C2.3), SSN 104 (NOAA) / F10.7 138 sfu (Jun 2026); Cycle 25
smoothed peak ~160.9 @ 2024-10 (declining). Files ~7 KB + ~47 KB.
Downloads six representative full-disk channels to
public/textures/sun/ and writes a provenance
manifest.json:
- Service:
https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_{RES}_{CHANNEL}.jpg. - License: NASA public domain. Credit "NASA/SDO and the AIA, EVE, and HMI science teams."
- CORS: SDO images send no
Access-Control-Allow-Originheader (verified) → WebGL textures would be tainted → committed, not fetched live.
These are full-disk square disk images of the Sun's Earth-facing side — NOT equirectangular maps. AIA channels are false-color by wavelength. The app must show them as the observed disk (or on a sphere only with an "approximate — disk image, not a map" label), as a snapshot, not "live."
python scripts/sun/fetch_imagery.py --outdir public/textures/sun
# --res 2048 higher-res SDO source (512/1024/2048/4096)
# --max-px 1024 downsample longest side if largerNeeds Pillow. Each image is verified: JPEG magic bytes (FF D8 FF) + Pillow
decode + non-degenerate pixels. Verified output 2026-07-18: 6× 1024×1024 JPEG,
82–231 KB each (all < 1 MB), real observation timestamps recorded from
Last-Modified.