REPORT FROM ISAS
                        28-Feb-94 to 15-Mar-94
                              L. W. Acton

The big news is that the annual forecast of the peak of the cherry
blossoms was published--April 1.  The buds are swelling and the plum
blossoms are already profuse.  It is a lovely time in Japan.

I'm sorry for this long delayed status report.  Last week we carried out
a coordinated X-ray Bright Point (XBP) campaign with Karen Harvey at
Kitt Peak with the cooperation of Big Bear and Mees solar observatories.
These campaigns are extremely taxing for the SXT Chief Observer (me) but
we did manage to get some very interesting observations of tiny tiny
repetitive, paired, "picoflares" on 10-Mar-94.  It remains to be seen if
this can be called a "discovery".

A couple of other interesting local scientific developments.  Hudson has
been looking at SXT data for "super-hot" HXT flares and found a location
in one event for which the SXT temperature may be as high as 40 million K
--in good agreement with the HXT temperature.  I think this is a record
high temperature from SXT even though we worked hard in designing the 
filters way back when to give some temperature discrimination all the
way to 100 MK. 

On 28-FEB-94 22:05:51 to 22:12:21 SXT observed a clear (?) example of
what appears to be a gradual brightening of a single loop well up in the
leg of the loop (but not at the apex) with no brightening during the
observing interval at the feet of the loop.  This event looks for all
the world like the "simple loop flare"--a popular cartoon model that
came out of the Skylab era and which I had largely written off.

We enjoyed two excellent Yohkoh seminars during the reporting period. 
Masuda san reported on his thesis research on the location, evolution,
and physical conditions of impulsive hard x-ray sources.  His most
intriguing result is the observation of a hard x-ray source above the
brightest part of the soft x-ray loop as well as the previously reported
footpoint sources.  At this location the soft x-rays, although faint,
yield the highest temperatures in the image.  An active discussion
ensued on whether to interpret the hard x-rays on the basis of a thermal
or non-thermal model--as you might have expected!

On 10-Mar-94 M. Yamada of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory gave a
talk on experiments on magnetic reconnection in the Spheromak machine at
the University of Tokyo.  In these experiments the magnetic Reynolds
number is several hundred, far from the 10^7 in a flare but much more
realistic than the magnetic Reynolds number of 1 or less in most lab
experiments.  The analogy to solar processes was, to me, quite
compelling and exciting!  I especially liked the comment that magnetic
reconnection is going on everywhere anything moves--all the time.

Gary Linford has returned to California for a well-deserved rest after
working hard and long on the Ultrix upgrade of all of the ISASS
computers.  During this period I enjoyed showing SXT movies to 2
visitors from the Environment, Science and Technology section of the U.
S. Embassy, M. A. G. Michaud, Minister-Counselor, and W. G. Duggleby,
Second Secretary.

During the next week we look forward to visits by Karen and Jack Harvey
and Len Culhane.