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P. N. Bernasconi, D. M. Rust, H. A. Eaton, G. A. Murphy (JHU/APL)
In January 2000, an 80-cm F/1.5 Ritchey-Chretien solar telescope flew for18 days suspended from a balloon in the stratosphere above Antarctica. The goal of the flight was to acquire long time series of high-resolution images and vector magnetograms of the solar photosphere and chromosphere. Such observations will help to advance our basic scientific understanding of solar activity, in particular, flares and coronal mass ejections. Flying well above the turbulent layers of the Earth's atmosphere, the telescope obtained unprecedented sharp and stable observations of small-scale solar features. To achieve this goal we developed a platform for the optical telescope that is stable to nearly 10 arcsec. In addition, we developed an image motion compensation system that stabilizes the solar image on the focal plane to about 1 arcsec. When the payload was in line of sight with the ground station, communications were accomplished via a low-speed radio link for sending commands and receiving telemetry and a high-speed downlink for receiving images. During the rest of the flight, contact with the payload was sporadic and only instrument status could be telemetered down. After the flight, the data were recovered from on-board tapes. This presentation will focus on the description of the instrument and its operating principle. Preliminary results from the January 2000 flight will be presented in a companion paper.