White-light movies of the solar photosphere from the soup instrument on spacelab 2

We present initial results on solar granulation, pores and sunspots from the white-light films obtained by the Solar Optical Universal Polarimeter (SOUP) instrument on Spacelab 2. SOUP contains a 30-cm Cassegrain telescope, an active secondary mirror for image stabilization, and a white-light optical system with 35-mm film and video cameras. Outputs from the fine guidance servo provided engineering data on the performance of the ESA Instrument Pointing System (IPS). Several hours of movies were taken at various disk and limb positions in quiet and active regions. The images are diffraction-limited at 0.5 arc second resolution and are, of course, free of atmospheric seeing and distortion. Properties of the granulation in magnetic and non-magnetic regions are compared and are found to differ significantly in size, rate of intensity variation, and lifetime. In quiet sun on the order of fifty percent of the area has at least one “exploding granule” occurring in it during a 25 minute period. Local correlation tracking has detected several types of transverse flows, including systematic outflow from the penumbral boundary of a spot, motion of penumbral filaments, and cellular flow patterns of supergranular and mesogranular size. Feature tracking has shown that in quiet sun the average granule fragment has a velocity of about one kilometer per second.