SXT Status Report 10 July - 16 June 1995 (Week 28) --------- David Alexander 15-Jul-95 Startling news this week. We were able to see the Sun without the use of the satellite. Yes, it finally stopped raining. And with the sunshine a young man's fancy turns to ... the huge bugs in this place. Cycling home at night is downright dangerous. One of these megabugs hits you at 20 miles an hour and it's all you can do to stay on the bike. Japanese news this week was dominated by the American All-Star game (that's baseball for those fortunate enough never to have heard of it). Actually, I shouldn't say the game dominated the news but Nomo pitching his two innings, Nomo tying his shoelaces, Nomo yawning etc. The "Tornado" has certainly taken America by storm and has certainly put the wind up the major league batters. Personally, I find baseball marginally more interesting than cricket (which I find marginally more interesting than being poked in the eye with a sharp stick!). We were joined by a couple of Brits this week. Jim Lang from DRAL and Andy Philips from MSSL. We now outnumber the yanks by a significant proportion. Not only that but with Jim Lang and Joe Khan being here, us Scots are now in control. Now if only we could make the locals (American and Japanese) understand a word we say. Actually, I have been criticised by my co-Celts for using American expressions. I guess I'm suffering from the "The dilithium crystals canna take it" syndrome, the main symptom of which is the degradation of one's accent while under stress. I shall have to practice singing "Scot's Wha Hae", and making a few jabs at the English. Nothing like insulting the English to get that feeling of Scottishness back. Now to this week's report, brought to you in part by "Armalite bug spray", one clip should be enough for any creepy crawly. SOLAR ACTIVITY The activity level remains low. Not much doing on the campaign or special observations front. We stuck with standard observations this week and observed some beautiful loops associated with AR7887. SXT INSTRUMENT STATUS The SXT instrument continues to be in great working order with only one bitmap error this week. CALIBRATION STATUS The offpoint terminator program continues with many terminator images taken this week. The diligence of the SSOC tohbans helps make this a successful program. PASS CONFLICTS We lost a total of 6 passes due to conflicts with ASCA. SCIENCE Khan, Hudson and Alexander continue to discuss the interesting time development seen in the hard X-ray images of solar flares which show significant coronal emission. In particular, the preliminiary work shows that the standard electron beam heating and chromospheric evaporation model seems capable of explaining much of the observed behaviour. More work is required before this statement can be fully quantified. SEMINARS There was one seminar this week at ISAS: "Interpretation of White-Light Coronal Structures and the Confinement of Cosmical Plasmas" - Serge Koutchmy, Inst. D'Ap. Paris and NAOJ Serge is spending 3 months at NAOJ and kindly came to ISAS to present his seminar. He addressed some of the historical aspects of white loght solar observations and discussed some modelling of sheet-like structures in helmet streamers. He also discussed the production of the non-radial large-scale structures observed in the white light data. PERSONNEL Jim Lang (DRAL) and Andy Philips (MSSL) arrived at ISAS for one and two weeks, respectively. They are here to set-up the new BCS computers and have been very successful and haven't sworn once. QUOTE OF THE WEEK "We cannot perceive unless we anticipate, but we must not see only what we anticipate." -U. Neisser, 1976 Week 28 Tohbans: SSOC: Hori and Nagata KSC: Tonooka and Magara SXT Chief Observer: D. Alexander SXT Systems and Data Engineer: G. Linford