Authors: Don Kolinski (HAO / NFS NCAR), Tom Berger (HAO / NFS NCAR), Ben Berkey (HAO / NFS NCAR), Joan Burkepile (HAO / NFS NCAR), Giuliana deToma (HAO / NFS NCAR), Alfred de Wijn (HAO / NFS NCAR), & Mike Galloy (HAO / NFS NCAR)
We’re back! The Mauna Loa Solar Observatory (MLSO), operated by the High Altitude Observatory (HAO / NSF NCAR), has provided nearly continuous ground-based observations of the Sun from the northern flank of Mauna Loa, Hawaii since 1965. Situated at 3,440 meters in elevation, the site is known for its exceptional coronal skies and hosts an online data archive spanning coronagraph, H-alpha, and He-I observations from 1980 to the present. In November 2022, lava flows from the eruption of Mauna Loa destroyed a large section of the access road and the power lines to the site. Full operations did not resume until the access road was repaired in May 2025, over three years after the eruption.
Although the road to the observatory is open again, utility-supplied power has not been restored. The K-Coronagraph (K-Cor) instrument was brought back online soon after the road reopened using a small, portable solar array. K-Cor observes the white-light corona from 1.05 to 3 solar radii with a nominal cadence of 15 seconds. Because K-Cor’s field of view starts so low, it can detect CMEs an average of 55 minutes earlier than space-based coronagraphs, providing critical support for space weather operations, including NASA’s Artemis II mission. MLSO’s other instrument, the Upgraded Coronal Multi-channel Polarimeter (UCoMP), is awaiting the completion of a larger, permanent solar array. We expect observations to begin early this summer. UCoMP can image the intensity, full Stokes polarization, Doppler shift, and line width across coronal emission lines in the visible and near-IR with a FOV of 1.03 to 1.95 solar radii and a spectral range of 530 to 1083 nanometers.
In this poster, we describe new K-Cor and UCoMP data products, new software tools including an MLSO data API and Jupyter Notebooks for compositing MLSO data with SDO/AIA observations, and the current status of the Chromospheric and Prominence Magnetometer (ChroMag).