SOHO/Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) Data Archive

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. 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:
- How is the corona heated?
- Where and how is the solar wind accelerated?
- What causes coronal transients, and what role do they play in the
evolutionary development of large-scale coronal patterns?

LASCO was built by an international consortium of four institutions in
four different countries:
- Naval Research Laboratory, Washington, DC
- Max-Planck-Institute for Aeronomy, Lindau, Germany
See also: http://star.mpae.gwdg.de/indexe.shtml
- Department of Physics and Space Research, University of Birmingham,
Birmingham, England
- Laboratoire d'Astronomie Spatiale, Marseille, France

All SOHO/LASCO data are available from the public SOHO data archive:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html

Mirror archives are available at:
SOHO Archive at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, UK.:
http://trace.solararchive.rl.ac.uk/soho/

SOHO Archive at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, France:
http://idc-medoc.ias.u-psud.fr/

SOHO Archive at Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino, Torino, Italy:
http://solar.to.astro.it/