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GONG First Light (1Jun95) (from NOAO HIGHLIGHTS!, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995) The GONG Project has achieved ``first light'' from the first of the six elements of its network with the deployment of the first station at the El Teide Observatory of the Instituto de Astrofisica des Canarias on Tenerife. GONG Project personnel and collaborators from the IAC obtained 4 hours and 30 minutes of observations on 17 January; the station has since begun daily observations. [Photo not included] The GONG station at the El Teide Observatory of the Instituto de Astrofisica des Canarias on Tenerife, Spain Observations were obtained simultaneously at El Teide and in Tucson, with the station destined for the Big Bear Solar Observatory, of one of the 1.3 million individual modes of oscillation that the GONG stations measure. Each GONG image is transformed into roughly 1.3 million spherical harmonics. The comparison of simultaneous measurements of one of these modes shows that the El Teide data nicely fills in the gaps in the ``Big Bear'' data. Obtaining continuous measurements is what GONG was created for. More remarkable, however, are the very small differences---only a few cm/sec---between THe two stations when they are observing simultaneously (see figure below). Of course, a lot more instrumental and data processing adjusting will take place before the full network comes online early this fall---and with the recent completion of the Learmonth, Western Australia deployment there are still four more deployments to complete---but these first results are heartening confirmation that the instrument can perform well and that the analysis procedures are capable of isolating the same one mode out of the millions superimposed, enabling the merging of data from multiple sites. We anticipate providing a 36-day run of data from a three-site, mini-network to the community by mid-summer. [Figure not included] John Leibacher and the GONG Team
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