LASCO data use and retrieval policies
Table of Contents:
Retrieval Policies
The LASCO team will provide data to the public and to the
scientific community as soon as possible after data collection.
While the data are completely open and unrestricted, we do ask
that the LASCO team be acknowledged to recognize the
investment in time that the team has made in developing
the instrument, in operating it and in developing
the calibration tools and other procedures to handle these
outstanding data.
However, note that as of October 1, 2009, the team is no longer funded to
reduce and calibrate the data and then to make them available to the community.
Simply put this means:
- If the data are printed or
stored on another web site, we request that the
acknowledgement accompany the data.
- If the data are used in any published accounts, the
acknowledgement should be cited.
- Analyses of the coronal data are greatly enhanced by
collaborations with scientists both inside and outside the LASCO
team. Collaborations are highly encouraged.
No funds are available from LASCO for collaborators, but we do offer
the data, a considerable resource.
We strongly recommend that if you are not familiar with the data, that you
collaborate with a member of the consortium.
- All Level 1 or Level 2
products will be available for unrestricted use. We continue to validate
the calibrations and therefore we strongly recommend that you contact a member of the
team to see if there is an updated calibration that might affect your work.
Registration
No registration is needed to access or download the LASCO data.
Retrieving Data
The LASCO archive is a collection of data files
and documentation. All
of the on-line documentation
is available at the LASCO home page. The data files
can be grouped into various image types with different formats. The image
formats are either FITS,
JPEG, GIF or postscript. Files of movies are in either the MPEG-1
or MVI format. All of the formats are
international or defacto standards,
except for the MVI format, which is an internal LASCO format. A number of
IDL procedures have been written to handle MVI files.
The catalog system is a listing of all of the level 0.5 and 1.0 products
(image files). The list had been managed by the
Sybase Database Management
System (DBMS) but is now managed by the open source DBMS MySQL.
The interface to the DBMS from the Web is "wdb", originally written
by the Space Telescope/European Coordination Facility (ST/ECF) and
enables queries to be constructed. The output of the query is a list
of images that satisfies the criteria that were selected. A pointer to
the individual FITS images is also returned. This pointer enables the
FITS image to be returned if desired. Since these files are in FITS format,
you will need a viewer such as
SAOIMAGE or DS9 to view them.
Each file contains a single exposure. Separate,
but related, images may be grouped together into a logical dataset. A small
"browse" image is also available in JPEG format.
Many of the other products are available by following the links found
in the data products web page.
To select a file or files you start by using the catalog query. The file names
are a combination of the telescope indication, the processing level and then a
sequential file number. Thus the catalog system allows you to relate
observations that meet the desired criteria with the files. To start, you
might be interested in the observations for a given date and telescope.
Acknowledgement
If you use the data or some product based on the data, we ask that you tell us
that you are using it, send us a copy of the resulting research report or paper
and that you include an acknowledgement as follows:
"The SOHO/LASCO data used here are produced by a consortium of the Naval
Research Laboratory (USA), Max-Planck-Institut fuer Aeronomie (Germany),
Laboratoire d'Astronomie (France), and the University of Birmingham (UK).
SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA."
Please note that the MPI for Aeronomy (MPAe) has changed its name to the Max-Planck-Institut
for Sonnensystemforschung (MPS) and that the Laboratoire d'Astronomie (LAS) has changed its
name to the Laboratoire d'Astrophysique Marseille (LAM).