29 July 1996 Hugh Hudson SXT CHIEF OBSERVER'S REPORT AND TABLE PLAN SXT CHIEF OBSERVER'S REPORT for Week 30: 21-JUL-96 to 29-JUL-96 "No wonder nobody ever comes here. The place is always crowded." - Yogi Berra SOLAR ACTIVITY The active region responsible for this month's X flare reappeared on Friday, with a sudden increase of brightness. As before there appeared to be a collection of high-altitude loops, plus a bright low-lying structure extended along the limb. Apparently SOHO detected a major coronal mass ejection from this active region on Saturday (20 July) when it was almost at the opposite-side disk center. Amazing. SXT INSTRUMENT STATUS SXT continues to function well. A read-noise artifact appeared with the the long exposures for the VLA campaign intended for 27 July, so we cancelled our participation and returned to a standard observing table. There was a remarkable series of patrol images dumps (3 in a row) which appeared to be dark frames, rather than normal data. This plus the difficulty ARS had with the dead minimum of about 22-July caused concern, but Kano_san correctly identified the problem - no problem, all three happened to occur at day/night terminators! Amazing. CAMPAIGNS We attempted to participate in a VLA campaign scheduled for 27 July, but the resurgence of activity made this impossible. The next campaign effort scheduled will begin on 8 August and will continue for a month. This is the SOHO campaign on coronal structure, JOP045, organized by Gibson and Biesecker. We will test some aspects of the planned observations this week; stay tuned to "finger campaign@isass0" to see if we have made any progress. SEMINARS July 18, 1996 T. Yoshida: "There is no steady SXT loop with length less than 10^9.5 cm" T. Yoshida: "Cool steady structures and hot transient structures in active regions" M. Kundu: "Jets in Microwaves!" PROBLEMS There were severe problems at KSC at the beginning of this week, including a day's data loss because typhoon #6 required the cancellation of an OP upload. We were also without regular reformatted data for several days because the data link to KSC was down. Finally the table archive system became confused because of the lost link, and new SXT observing tables could not be uploaded until 25-Jul. SXT TABLE PLAN FOR WEEK 30 (29-Jul-96 to 5-Aug-96) The following list shows routine tables only. A plan for campaign support will be circulated later and may include additional tables. A dark calibration table will be loaded on Wednesday, and the weekly diffusers included as part of a standard table on Thursday. KSC Time (start) in JST Pass Table ID _____________(= UT + 9 hrs)______#_______________________________ Monday 30-JUL-96 02:06:14 4 960729 P4 ARS1 DKCAL Tuesday 30-JUL-96 21:15:29 2 960730 P2 ARS1 STD+DIFF Wednesday 31-JUL-96 00:41:59 4 960730 P4 ARS1 STD Thursday 1-AUG-96 23:36:44 3 960801 P3 ARS1 STD Saturday 3-AUG-96 19:05:14 2 960727 P2 ARS1 STD *** Please note that this table plan may change *** Continuing requests: We request that KSC tohbans continue to dump a patrol image each time an SXT table is loaded to facilitate the study of optimizing ARS parameters for an awfully, awfully quiet period. SSOC TOHBAN, please fax the preliminary OP list to D-tou when it contains a terminator so that the Chief Observer can suggest which OG's to use.