Digitized Solar-X-ray Coronal Images

Description

The X-ray telescope (experiment S-054) was a grazing incidence instrument with a spatial resolution of approximately 2 arc seconds on axis and had six broadband X-ray filters in the 2 - 60 Angstrom range. The data were recorded on film which was returned to Earth by the astronauts. Approximately 6500 frames of film were available on each film magazine. One camera magazine was used during the first (SL-2) Skylab mission. Two were used during the second mission (SL-3), and two magazines were exposed during SL-4. In total, approximately 32,000 solar X-ray exposures were obtained. The X-ray images were scanned with a microdensitometer at American Science & Engineering (the instrument contractor). Approximately 3000 scanned images were produced from the 32,000 original photographs. The image scans vary in size; the full disk images are usually 1234x1244 pixels or 1400x1401. The digital data were stored on magnetic tapes. In 1990, these tapes were received by NSSDC. Due to age, not all of the tapes were readable, but the readable tapes were copied to IBM 3480 tape cartridges and to optical disk WORM platters. Paper catalogs of these images may be accessed through standard NSSDC request channels, and digitized versions of many of the scanned images are available to requesters. A program is also available to reformat the image files from their native format as IBM 360/370 floating point binary data into the binary data format of the user's computer.

Ancillary Data Information