YEARS 2009 TO 2011: SUN & MILKY WAY ON SOLAR MASS EJECTION IMAGER (SMEI) - PT 3

SMEI Camera Geometry: The Solar Mass Ejection Imager (SMEI) consists of three cameras, each with a field of view of roughly 60 degrees, that are oriented on the Coriolis spacecraft in such a way that, together, they image a strip of sky that is roughly 180 degrees wide. As the spacecraft moves through its Sun-synchronous polar orbit, the SMEI cameras sweep out nearly the entire sky in a pushbroom fashion. Due to the geometry of the orbit and the need to keep direct sunlight out of the SMEI cameras, there is an exclusion zone with a diameter of roughly 20 degrees in the sunward direction. (There is also a smaller exclusion zone in the anti-sunward direction.)

Since (nearly) the entire sky visible from the Earth is imaged every orbit (101 minutes), these images can be combined into a single "fisheye" image of the sky. This is accomplished using the Hammer-Aitoff projection. This is an equal-area map projection that displays the celestial sphere on an ellipse. For SMEI, the Hammer-Aitoff images are centered on the Sun and the point in the anti-sunward direction (from the perspective of the Earth) is mapped to the outer ellipse. This way, disturbances from the Sun will appear to originate at the center of the image and propagate outward as they travel to 1 A.U. and beyond. - Original reference: http://smei.nso.edu/image_info.html

Data Credits to: http://smei.nso.edu

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