GONG Newsletter #31, August - National Solar Observatory

Site Focus ... Mauna Loa Solar Observatory
Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO) is operated by the High Altitude
Observatory (HAO), a division of the National Center for Atmospheric
Research and funded by the National Science Foundation. The observatory is
located at an elevation of 3,400 meters (11,000 feet) on the north slope of
Mauna Loa which is an active shield volcano rising 4,200 meters (13,800
feet) above sea level on the Island of Hawaii. The Mauna Loa site was
chosen for its unique properties that include a mountain thousands of kilometers
away from any continental land mass, young lava, and lack of
nearby vegetation. These factors keep local particulate contamination to a
minimum and provide the clean, dry air and dark skies necessary for exceptional
coronal measurements. MLSO operates an assortment of instruments
built by HAO and the NSO that observe the solar corona, chromosphere, photosphere,
and solar interior. HAO is dedicated to the study of the Sun and of the
response of the Earth’s upper atmosphere to the Sun’s output. As a nationally
sponsored laboratory, HAO is committed to the dissemination of its data to the
community at large.
Data collected include: solar oscillations by GONG and ECHO, used to determine solar interior rotation rates and structure; photometry
of the chromosphere and photosphere by PSPT (NSO) to study solar variability; chromospheric observations in Hα by PICS and Helium
1083 nm by CHIP; MK4 electron density images of the corona. PICS, CHIP and MK4 are used to study solar activity including coronal
mass ejections and long-term solar cycle variability. Movies and images of present and past data are available via the internet at:
http://mlso.hao.ucar.edu.
MLSO and GONG are guests on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) site.
(http://stratus.mlo.hawaii.gov.) MLO is a baseline station for NOAA’s Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory (CMDL). CMDL
conducts research related to atmospheric constituents such as gases, aerosols, solar radiation, meteorology, and precipitation chemistry that
are capable of forcing change in the climate of the Earth’s environment. MLO also hosts cooperative programs with the Network for the
Detection of Stratospheric Change and many other research institutions.
GONG’s web site http://www.gong.noao.edu is up-to-date with
Project status, scientific investigations and publications, access to
data products, and links to other activities within the field of helioseismology.
The FTP archives for GONG can be found at the anonymous FTP
address: ftp://www.gong.noao.edu/pub/gong.
The GONG Newsletter is also available on GONG’s web site as a
WWW document and an easily printable PDF document. We encourage
you to avail yourself of this service.
You can be removed from the hardcopy mailing list, and added to
the e-mail notification list, by simply sending an e-mail message to
gong@noao.edu.
The GONG Project is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through the National Solar Observatory (NSO),
which is operated under a cooperative agreement between the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), Inc. and NSF.
The GLOBAL OSCILLATION NETWORK GROUP
P.O. Box 26732
Tucson, Arizona 85726-6732
USA