The SOHO/LASCO Instrument Homepage

LASCO LZ Data Locator

LASCO LZ data access

All LASCO level-0.5 (LZ) data is available online through this website. Access is provided directly to the individual directories that contain the data. We recommend the use of a tool such as wget to download data in bulk.

Use the below menus to generate the url for the date you are interested in. Clicking the "Go to page" button will open that link in a new tab. You will then be presented with directories for "c2", "c3", and "c4" (EIT). For dates prior to June 1998, you will also be able to access data for "c1".

Year: Month: Day: Camera:

WGET

The following button will generate a wget command based on the input url, above. This command should download all .fts files from the specified url, and save them in a directory structure like "yymmdd/cc/" where yymmdd is the selected date, and cc is the camera. This way, you should be able to modify the wget command easily and (e.g.) download both c2 and c3 data into the same structure.

IMPORTANT: any wget commands should be verified by the user and closely monitored during downloading to ensure that the correct files are being downloaded into the expected directory structure. Users must also ensure they have enough disk space for the download process.

The img_hdr.txt files

LASCO filenames do not (yet) follow the standard yyyymmdd_hhmmss format, and instead use a sequential integer value. Thus, in each YYMMDD/camera subdirectory there is a plain text "img_hdr.txt" file that lists the FITS file names along with selected metadata for those files. The wget commands that are generated above include the flag "-A txt" to ensure that these img_hdr.txt files are included with the wget download.

There is also a "master" img_hdr.txt file which summarizes every LASCO image recorded since mission ops began. You can download this file directly by right-clicking and saving this file: https://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/lz/img_hdr.txt. Note that this is a very large text file, currently over 2.4 million lines long, so we do not recommend displaying it in-browser.

Other data sources

LASCO LZ data is also archived by NASA GSFC, and can be obtained via urls like https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/pub/lasco_level05/YYMMDD, where YYMMDD is your chosen YYMMDD date. But note that NASA servers do not currently allow wget commands, and thus files must be downloaded individually.

If you are looking for realtime LASCO FITS data, this can be obtained via https://umbra.nascom.nasa.gov/pub/lasco/lastimage/level_05/. Again, wget does not currently work on this NASA server.