Weekly Notes from the Yohkoh Soft X-Ray Telescope

(Week 9, 1998)

27-Feb-98 08:45 UT

Instrument Status

The SXT instrument continued to operate without problems, despite the possibility of attitude control confusion due to the very deep solar eclipse. See the weekly operations report for details. The GOES time series for the week:

In the display above (click to enlarge), the colored lines show the times of SXT images that currently are on-line at ISAS. The purple lines are flare mode. Alas, the scale is too compressed here to be able to see individual data! Most of the gaps will be filled in when the NASA telemetry arrives. For a summary index listing of the weekly science reports, click here.

Science nugget: X-ray Solar Eclipse

The highlight this week was of course the solar eclipse. This eclipse occurred during Thursday late night, JST, so the observation tables had to be loaded several hours in advance. Full-Sun images with a cadence of approximately 32 seconds were acquired during all three eclipse episodes (see last week's Eclipse Planning Page for details). Partial-Sun images were acquired of a small active region just on the edge of the moon's apparent path. Due to a planning oversight, the resulting cadence of those images was 10 seconds, rather than the hoped-for 8 seconds. Analysis of those images will occupy us for some time.

Movies of the eclipse episodes as viewed by Yohkoh SXT are on the web! To view an event, click on one of the images below. Note: These movies are fairly large and will take some time to download. They will be available from American mirror sites very soon. Also, the MPEG color table is black-and-white, rather than red.


Event 1
Event 2
Event 3

Eclipse Observing Team: D. McKenzie, H. Hudson, R. Kano, T. Shimizu, S. Yasiro

David McKenzie, 27-Feb-97 (email mckenzie@isass0.solar.isas.ac.jp)