Data center for observations from the solar telescope on La Palma

The Swedish solar observatory on La Plama was upgraded in mid 2002 to one meter diameter - the largest solar telescope in the world at a good astronomical site. The Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics of the University of Oslo financed 10% of this upgr ade and have also made contributions to the building of a modern set of auxiliary instruments (adaptive optics system and H-alpha filter). The first observations from the new telescope were published in Nature 14 November 2003. The telescope will be the major ground based facility for solar physicists in Oslo for many years. Data of extremely high quality have already been assembled by our researchers. One good observing day generates 60 Gbytes of compressed raw data needing 200 Gbytes of storage for data reduction. A h igh capacity storage facility is therefore needed for the analysis of La Plama data. Large capacity will make it possible to also store observations from other groups carried out at La Palma and make possible research based on data-mining.