The USAF Phillips Lab group at NSO/SP has received funding for a design study for a replacement to the Solar Optical Observing Network (SOON). The existing SOON, which was designed and built at NSO/SP under the direction of R.B. Dunn, has been the mainstay of the USAF solar optical monitoring program for two decades, and has provided the solar community with patrol images and archival data in Ha and white light. The new system will emphasize automated, "observerless" operation based on a tunable filter and CCD detectors. Happily for solar physics, the AF and NOAA/SEC requirements for solar monitoring strongly overlap those outlined for a new-generation full-disk imager described in NSO's proposal to the NSF for Synoptic Optical Long-term Investigations of the Sun (SOLIS).
Don Neidig