Visualisation of data sets

Using different visualisation techniques we can change the many numbers in to lines, surfaces or three dimensional objects on the computer screen. In this way the output is much easier to look at. Instead of reading a huge amount of numbers and try to understand them, we can use our brains superior capacity to analyse shapes and sizes of objects. When you have got used to these artificial objects it does not take a long time to look through huge amounts of data, looking for small changes in the structure of the objects you have chosen to visualise. In this way it is much easier to construct an idea about the physical process' that control the experiment.

Below are three examples of data visualisation.

This plot shows the temperature at constant height above the photosphere in prominence formation experiment.

two dimensional plot

The temperature is here shown in a plane of constant height in the same experiment as used above. The blue line represent the data show in the previous image.

three dimensional plot

A surface of constant temperature is shown as a blue object. The surface through the object indicates the height of the plot in the previous image.

As you see the three different plots provide different information about the problem and to get a good understanding of complicated experiments such as the prominence formation experiment shown in the movie of the prominence formation, we have to look at many different things before we understand how and why the experiment evolves in the way it does. It often takes longer to analyse the data than to run the experiment on the computer!

Return to the "data analysis" page.