40 research outputs found
Off-limb EUV observations of the solar corona and transients with the CORONAS-F/SPIRIT telescope-coronagraph
The SPIRIT telescope aboard the CORONAS-F satellite (in orbit from 26 July 2001 to 5 December 2005), observed the off-limb solar corona in the 175 Ã… (Fe IX, X and XI lines) and 304 Ã… (He II and Si XI lines) bands. In the coronagraphic mode the mirror was tilted to image the corona at the distance of 1.1...5 <I>R</I><sub>sun</sub> from the solar center, the outer occulter blocked the disk radiation and the detector sensitivity was enhanced. This intermediate region between the fields of view of ordinary extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) telescopes and most of the white-light (WL) coronagraphs is responsible for forming the streamer belt, acceleration of ejected matter and emergence of slow and fast solar wind. We present here the results of continuous coronagraphic EUV observations of the solar corona carried out during two weeks in June and December 2002. The images showed a "diffuse" (unresolved) component of the corona seen in both bands, and non-radial, ray-like structures seen only in the 175 Ã… band, which can be associated with a streamer base. The correlations between latitudinal distributions of the EUV brightness in the corona and at the limb were found to be high in 304 Ã… at all distances and in 175 Ã… only below 1.5 <I>R</I><sub>sun</sub>. The temporal correlation of the coronal brightness along the west radial line, with the brightness at the underlying limb region was significant in both bands, independent of the distance. On 2 February 2003 SPIRIT observed an expansion of a transient associated with a prominence eruption seen only in the 304 Ã… band. The SPIRIT data have been compared with the corresponding data of the SOHO LASCO, EIT and UVCS instruments
The SWAP EUV Imaging Telescope Part I: Instrument Overview and Pre-Flight Testing
The Sun Watcher with Active Pixels and Image Processing (SWAP) is an EUV
solar telescope on board ESA's Project for Onboard Autonomy 2 (PROBA2) mission
launched on 2 November 2009. SWAP has a spectral bandpass centered on 17.4 nm
and provides images of the low solar corona over a 54x54 arcmin field-of-view
with 3.2 arcsec pixels and an imaging cadence of about two minutes. SWAP is
designed to monitor all space-weather-relevant events and features in the low
solar corona. Given the limited resources of the PROBA2 microsatellite, the
SWAP telescope is designed with various innovative technologies, including an
off-axis optical design and a CMOS-APS detector. This article provides
reference documentation for users of the SWAP image data.Comment: 26 pages, 9 figures, 1 movi
Recent Developments of NEMO: Detection of Solar Eruptions Characteristics
The recent developments in space instrumentation for solar observations and
telemetry have caused the necessity of advanced pattern recognition tools for
the different classes of solar events. The Extreme ultraviolet Imaging
Telescope (EIT) of solar corona on-board SOHO spacecraft has uncovered a new
class of eruptive events which are often identified as signatures of Coronal
Mass Ejection (CME) initiations on solar disk. It is evident that a crucial
task is the development of an automatic detection tool of CMEs precursors. The
Novel EIT wave Machine Observing (NEMO) (http://sidc.be/nemo) code is an
operational tool that detects automatically solar eruptions using EIT image
sequences. NEMO applies techniques based on the general statistical properties
of the underlying physical mechanisms of eruptive events on the solar disc. In
this work, the most recent updates of NEMO code - that have resulted to the
increase of the recognition efficiency of solar eruptions linked to CMEs - are
presented. These updates provide calculations of the surface of the dimming
region, implement novel clustering technique for the dimmings and set new
criteria to flag the eruptive dimmings based on their complex characteristics.
The efficiency of NEMO has been increased significantly resulting to the
extraction of dimmings observed near the solar limb and to the detection of
small-scale events as well. As a consequence, the detection efficiency of CMEs
precursors and the forecasts of CMEs have been drastically improved.
Furthermore, the catalogues of solar eruptive events that can be constructed by
NEMO may include larger number of physical parameters associated to the dimming
regions.Comment: 12 Pages, 5 figures, submitted to Solar Physic