JHelioviewer lets you visualize solar image data and JPEG 2000 content in general. JPEG 2000 offers many useful new features and has the potential to revolutionize the way high-resolution image data are disseminated and analyzed. The JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol, JPIP, enables us to serve data in highly compressed, quality progressive, region-of-interest based form.

These features make it possible to minimize the data volume transmitted while maximizing its usability. This is especially relevant for solar physics since NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory will soon provide more than a terabyte of image data per day. Providing efficient access to this huge data volume at both high spatial and high time resolution is of paramount importance to support scientific discovery.

The following happen when you start JHelioviewer.
1. The required libraries will be downloaded to your machine (if any are missing).
2. A folder named JHelioviewer is created in the root folder for your system. This folder will contain libraries, configuration files, downloaded information, etc.
3. A default image (the one you see when you start the program) is downloaded to

JHelioviewer offers two modes of accessing remote images.
1. Accessing a remote image by specifying its jpip url directly
2. Accessing SOHO images using the Observation Panel

JHelioviewer is being developed by the ESA Helioviewer Team based at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. It is a Java Application and requires Java 5 or higher.

The license of this software is Free, you can free download and free use this image viewer software.