Welcome to the project website!

From 1969 to 1995, Big Bear Solar Observatory (BBSO) staff recorded all of their observations on 35 mm film before switching to digital imaging after 1995. These film data include full-disk observations from BBSO's 8 inch telescope and high-resolution observations from the 10 and 26 inch telescopes, with the cadence of observations ranging from 10 seconds to 1 minute. BBSO has an excellent clear sky fraction. These film data sets cover two and one-half solar cycles, include thousands of flares, and span the entire operational service of several space missions, including SMM, CGRO, and Yohkoh. Wide public access to these BBSO data films is impractical and their scientific capability has never been fully explored.

This project aims to digitize these films using specialized commercial digitizing equipment and archive them in the public domain. The BBSO data to be digitized includes full-disk and high-resolution H-alpha images, as well as He I images. The entire set of full-disk data will be converted to create a synoptic data base. High resolution film data will be digitized according to events selected by the full-disk data. All observed solar flares and filament eruptions will be automatically detected and cataloged using artificial intelligence methods that have been developed and implemented at the Space Weather Research Laboratory of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

Despite some limitations of the film data format, the long-term coverage and high quality of the BBSO data will have very broad applications for many statistical studies. For example, the study of a large number of archived events will improve the forecasting of future solar eruptive events, and thus assist operational space weather prediction. Targeted research on the filaments and flares will be carried out with the digitized data.

We are happy to hear from you. Please address questions/concerns to Haimin Wang. Staffs actively working on the project include Chang Liu, Rui Liu, together with three undergraduate students.