Introduction
Summary of LASCO/EIT What is LASCO? What is EIT? (external link) FAQ Realtime Images Near Real Time Movies Latest Images (Color) LASCO Blink Tool Database Queries and Download (Updated!) Data Products Image Gallery Movie Gallery Processing Levels FITS Header Keywords Data Policy LASCO Sky Map NEW!! Latest Site Updates Coronal Mass Ejections LASCO CDROMs LASCO FTP Server Eclipse Observations Carrington Maps LASCO Calibration Team and Operations Resources (NEW!) LASCO/C1 at MPAe (Germany) LASCO at LAS (France) LASCO Handbook Technical Notes Detailed Documentation Acronyms Solwind Images and CMEs SOHO Home page SOHO and SOHO Instruments Other Solar Satellites and Observatories |
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About LASCO
The Large Angle and Spectrometric COronagraph (LASCO) instrument is one of 11 instruments included on the joint NASA/ESA SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft. SOHO was launched on 2 December 1995 at 0808 UT (0308 EST) from the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida. The LASCO instrument is a set of three coronagraphs that image the solar corona from 1.1 to 32 solar radii. It is convenient to measure distances in terms of solar radii. One solar radius is about 700,000 km, 420,000 miles or 16 arc minutes. A coronagraph is a telescope that is designed to block light coming from the solar disk, in order to see the extremely faint emission from the region around the sun, called the corona. The essential questions of solar physics to be addressed by LASCO are:
LASCO was built by an international consortium of four institutions in four different countries:
For more information on LASCO see the LASCO User Handbook . A short summary of LASCO is available. Also, a special issue on SOHO was published by Solar Physics, December 1995. |