SoFT: Detecting and tracking magnetic structures in the solar photosphere

In this work, we present Solar Feature Tracking, a novel feature-tracking tool developed in Python and designed to detect, identify, and track magnetic elements in the solar atmosphere. It relies on a watershed segmentation algorithm to effectively detect magnetic clumps within magnetograms, which are then associated across successive frames to follow the motion of magnetic structures in the photosphere. Here, we study its reliability in detecting and tracking features under different noise conditions starting with real-world data observed with SDO/HMI and followed with simulation data obtained from the Bifrost numerical code to better replicate the movements and shape of actual magnetic structures observed in the Sun’s atmosphere within a controlled noise environment.