Weekly Notes from the Yohkoh Soft X-Ray Telescope

(Week 52)

27-Dec-97 08:00 UT

Instrument Status

The Soft X-ray Telescope continues to be working without problems. Solar activity diminished to the point where we could try the "super-long exposures" again, and were lucky to catch the phenomenon described below.

A more detailed report of this week's activities is available here.

Observation of the Week

(Click on the image to see a larger, more visible, version.)

The trans-equatorial interconnecting loop structure developed as we watched in the KSC playbacks on Dec. 26. This pair of images shows one from the 25th (Merry Christmas!) on the left for reference. Maybe it's just the illusion of perspective, but this surely looks to me like evidence that the interconnections develop at low altitudes. A time series of images is available but I don't have time to display them right now - but it appears that such an interconnection does not develop piecewise from smaller structures, as one might expect, but instead a previously existing structure of pretty much the final shape simply gets bright. So when did the interconnection happen, and why didn't we see it when it did?

HSH 27-Dec-97 (email hudson@isass0.solar.isas.ac.jp)