A Digital Archival System for Solar Images Obtained by the USAF Solar Observing Optical Network (SOON)

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The purpose of the proposal is to significantly enhance the quantity and quality of our current data base of digital images of solar active regions and activity by providing funds to purchase the recording equipment needed to save approximately 5,500 images per day from the five full-time SOON observations located around the world. We plan to install dual Exabyte 2.3 Gbyte tape drives at the five sites and to archive approximately 1,100 selected images per day per site. The purpose for this archival process is to make these invaluable data available to the entire scientific community for detailed studies of flares and active region evolution. The effort is intended to augment the infrastructure of the solar physics community by providing an unprecedented continuous coverage of the majority of solar active regions with high spatial resolution and moderate temporal resolution. We believe that the creation of the proposed archival data base of SOON images will form a major cornerstone of observations relating to flare triggering, flare build-up and energetics as well as active region evolution. This nearly continuous solar data set needs to be saved and placed (in a convenient way) in the hands of the solar physics community and compared with other data to provide new understandings of solar flares.