Notes on LASCO/EIT Camera Readout Errors 1996 & 1997

Last Update: 13 Mar 1998 SP

Above is a plot of the number of LASCO and EIT camera readout errors that occured per week in 1996 and 1997. Two things are noticable: 1) The spike in April of 1996 and 2) the rise in camera errors in August 1996.

Below is the same data shown as a function of the number of images taken. The April spike is still there but you can see that the plot is much smoother indicating that the number of camera errors is a function of the number of images taken (Note: in August 1996 OBE 153 was uploaded enabling observations to be scheduled from the Planning tool which increased the number of images taken). This is also seen in the distribution of errors per telescope (C1=127, C2=31, C3=19, EIT=135) which would be expected since C1 and EIT take the majority of images.

The interesting thing about the April spike is that during this time we had version 117 of OBE running. It is thought that camera readout errors are due to some kind of communications error between any camera and OBE. Maybe this version of OBE (which only ran for a week) somehow made the communications problem worse. We are looking into this.