Abstract
Solar flares are occasionally responsible for severe space-weather events, which can affect space-borne and ground-based infrastructures, endangering anthropic technological activities and even human health and safety. Thus, an essential activity in the framework of space-weather monitoring is devoted to the observation of the activity level on the Sun. In this context, the acquisition system of the Catania Solar Telescope has been recently upgraded in order to improve its contribution to the European Space Agency (ESA) – Space Weather Service Network through the ESA Portal, which represents the main asset for space weather in Europe. Here, we describe the hardware and software upgrades of the Catania Solar Telescope and the main data products provided by this facility, which include full-disk images of the photosphere and chromosphere, together with a detailed characterization of sunspot groups. As a showcase of the observational capabilities of the revamped Catania Solar Telescope, we report the analysis of a B5.4 class flare that occurred on 7 December 2020, simultaneously observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph and the Solar Dynamics Observatory satellites.
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Data Availability
The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the INAF-OACT repository at http://ssa.oact.inaf.it/oact/image_archive.php. For the flare description we also used IRIS data taken from https://iris.lmsal.com/data.html, HMI and AIA data available at http://jsoc.stanford.edu/.
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Acknowledgements
This research received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation 531 program under grant agreements No 824135 (SOLARNET) and support by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) under contract 2021-12-HH.0 to the co-financing INAF for the Italian contribution to the Solar-C EUVST preparatory science programme. This work was also supported by European Space Agency (ESA) in the context of the SWESNET project (contract 4000134036/21/D/MRP), by the Italian MIUR-PRIN 2017 on “Space Weather: impact on circumterrestrial environment of solar activity” and by the Universitá degli Studi di Catania (Piano per la Ricerca Universitá di Catania - Linea di intervento 2 “PIACERI”).
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Romano, P., Guglielmino, S.L., Costa, P. et al. On the Evolution of a Sub-C Class Flare: A Showcase for the Capabilities of the Revamped Catania Solar Telescope. Sol Phys 297, 7 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-021-01932-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-021-01932-z