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Session 73 - Solar Space Observations, SOHO & SERTS.
Display session, Friday, January 09
Exhibit Hall,

[73.03] LASCO Observations of Variability in the Quiescent Solar Corona

B. E. Wood, M. Karovska (SAO), J. W. Cook, G. E. Brueckner, R. A. Howard (NRL)

We discuss the localized small scale coronal variability detected in observations made by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) onboard SOHO. The LASCO C1 coronagraph was used to take images of small portions of the solar corona located in the streamer belt between roughly 1.1 and 2.0 R_ødot. Two sets of images were obtained several months apart. Each set contains images taken with LASCO's Fabry-Perot interferometer centered on the Fe XIV \lambda5303 line, and in the nearby continuum. The images were obtained about once every minute. Significant variability was detected in two compact loops, one in each sequence, which brighten at their tops by about 10% in one hour. In one of the loops, there appears to be a flow up one leg of the loop with a velocity of 100--200 km s^-1. The quiescent loop-top brightenings are reminiscent of transient loop-top brightenings seen in Yohkoh soft X-ray observations of the quiescent Sun and during flares.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: bwood@cfa.harvard.edu

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