REPORT FROM ISAS 10/16/91 (1844 JST) We've had quite a bit of trouble getting the data across since last week. However, substantial improvements in software and connectivity for this purpose are under way. SXT has been shut down since last Saturday night for a. Sunday break day. b. ACS software upgrade and test. It is a pity to lose so many days of observing. The SXT full disk movie, while jerky, at least had an image per day up to now. On 10/11/91 SXT recorded an impressive brightening of large scale structures near the center of the disk. In this case the loop system was not disrupted or dramatically changed but did show some evolution and movement. On 10/12-10/13 we got good coverage of 3 M or nearly M class flares. Two were on the limb and one on the disk. The flare trigger and automatic region selection and automatic exposure control worked fine. Angular resoution was 5 arcsec in these cases. I'm surprised at what I've seen of bright flares so far (no whoppers, mind you). Almost all of the action is in one or a few pixels that don't show much motion. They just get bright and then fade. features around the flare kernel appear more amorphous than typical active region structures. Fainter x-ray brightenings (flares too I guess) show more of the behavior we've grown to expect, i.e., brightening of loops from footpoints, apparent interaction of loops, etc. Don't pay much attention to this drivel--it will probably all change as our experience improves and we've looked at a few flares more closely. Sam stayed up all night his last night here trying to get software working and left with quite a bit of useful stuff done. Last night Mons was here all night finishing off a powerful sorting routine that lets one sort through the entire data base to locate all of the images of a certain kind (e.g., summation mode, exposure, quality, etc.) It is now a whiz to make movies that formerly took many hours of tedious searching. Atta' boy, Mons. Hugh is using the output of such a search of visible images to discover that the sun is getting bigger! No surprise to orbital mechanicians but not something one normally sees plotted so easily from space observations. I'm off to Nikko with Wolfson's and Tim tomorrow for a couple days. Sayonara. Loren Acton