SOHO C2 - Out of alignment

How do,

Looking at the current picture on the SOHO LASCO C2 coronograph...

URL:http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/
javagif/gifs_small/20030811_1506_c2.gif

[A standards compliant newsreader should be able to put that URL back
together, in theory, but if not readers'll have to do it by hand]

It would seem the centre disc is presently out of alignment with the sun.

Does anyone know if this disc simply stop the sun saturating the sensor,
does it happen often, or could this misalignment hurt (burn out) the
sensors? If the later, do the folk at SOHO even know (this is only present
on the most recently web-published picture)?

(Sorry for this post; I'd rather risking pepping up and mentioning this
here, just in case it really IS a 'someone should know' situation, but I
don't want to bother the SOHO mob with an e-mail unless I can be sure that
there's very good reason to do so.)

Ta-ra,
Julie

--
Julie Brandon http://www.computergeeks.co.uk/
__________________________________________________ _____________________________
NOTE: "news.cis.dfn.de" -- access to this news server changing, for info see

In article ,
Julie Brandon wrote:
How do,

Looking at the current picture on the SOHO LASCO C2 coronograph...

URL:http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/
javagif/gifs_small/20030811_1506_c2.gif

It would seem the centre disc is presently out of alignment with the sun.

Does anyone know if this disc simply stop the sun saturating the sensor,
does it happen often, or could this misalignment hurt (burn out) the
sensors? If the later, do the folk at SOHO even know (this is only present
on the most recently web-published picture)?

I've seen this beforte, but not for a while. LASCO is pretty robust,
so I'd not worry overmuch. I will drop a mail to the LASCO data manager
though (who I've known for nearly 20 years, so it's easy to be informal
about it). I've no doubt that they know about it, but it'll be interesting
to find out what's going on.

Thanks for posting that - being (notionally) on holiday I'd have missed it
otherwise.


--
Andy Breen ~ Interplanetary Scintillation research group
Physics Department, UW Aberystwyth
"When I was young I used to scintillate
now I only sin 'til ten past three" (Ogden Nash)