Dear colleagues,

this is the final announcement of the "Belgian EIT Reunion", the upcoming EIT consortium meeting to be held in Brussels on May 11 and May 12.

The meeting will take place in the conference facilities of "Hotel Arlequin" (17-19, Rue de la Fourche, Espace Arlequin, Petite rue des Bouchers, B-1000 Brussels) at 100 meter from the Grand Place/Grote Markt of Brussels. We'll have a registration desk in this hotel on Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning. If you didn't book your hotel yet, please do so immediately since you might have a hard time finding vacancies (check http://sol.oma.be/BeER/hotels.html). If possible, let us know your expected arrival times and in which hotel you are staying. We ask to pay a registration fee of 4000 BEF (roughly 100 Euro) which covers the conference facilities and the lunches on Thursday and Friday.

We have choosen to organise the meeting in 3 blocks each consisting of two sessions. We want to keep the schedule as flexible as possible, so what finally is going to be discussed depends entirely on you. Here are some starting ideas for presentations that you still might want to submit :

CALIBRATION & LEVEL 1

• What remains to be done to produce calibrated LEVEL 1 DATA ?
  How far did we get concerning DEM/temperature calculations ?
  What are acceptable/achievable accuracies ?
  Who is/will be doing what ?

• What is the current status of the CALROC program ?
  What can CALROC bring us for absolute calibration and to flat-field corrections ?
  What are the limitations ?
  Plans for CALROCII

• What is our current understanding of IN-FLIGHT INSTRUMENT DEGRADATION ?
  How is the global sensitivity loss evolving ?
  What do we know about the solar emissivity changes with the rising activity ?

• What is the current knowledge of the FLAT-FIELD ?
  What do we know about the non-uniform aging and contamination mechanisms ?

• How good do we understand the PSF, the stray light and the (assymmetrical) image background ?
  What did we learn from flares and Mercury transit on the PSF ?
  Are there changes in the PSF (pixel "cross-talk") and in the average background along the mission ?

SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS & NUMERICAL PROCESSING

Science discussion are perhaps not the prime item for a more technical meeting such as an EIT consortium meeting. Nevertheless, presentations of planned or ongoing analysis can be important to demonstrate the need for a change in planning/observation modes. The increasing size of the EIT archive also brings the need for numerical processing and automated image recognition tools.

• Which new research has emerged recently on the basis of EIT data ?

• What are requirments for your observations and how well do they fit in with EIT possibilities ?
  How do your requirements for observational data fit in with future operations of EIT, and with future solar missions ?

• For which future projects to you want to use EIT data ?
  What do you expect from future EIT data ?

• Which innovative analysis tools and methods have been developed ?
  Can we develop algorithmes that recognise "features" or "events" in the EIT images ?
  Can such algorithmes be of use for onboard processing in future missions ?

FUTURE PLANNING

• What is the current status of the instrument ?
  How did it recover after the "SOHO loss", which glitches and mechanism degradation have been observed more recently ?

• What are the boundary conditions ?
  (trends and prospects for the telemetry allocated to EIT, SOHO mission extension beyond 2001 ? Scaled down operations ?)

• Among the observing programs that many of us had in mind at the start of the mission, which ones were not yet implemented or completed ?
  What has the EIT/TRACE combination to offer that was not exploited yet ?

• How does the (future) presence of other EUV/SoftX imagers (TRACE, GOES, KORONAS F, SOLAR-B) influence our planning ?

• Which policy should be adopted for the baseline planning ?
  (synoptic, CME watch, regular bake outs,...)
  How can we improve baseline planning ?
  (additional wavelengths, higher cadence synoptic movies, spatial binning)

• Which exceptional observations and special sequences are allowable ?
  Which special events (eclipses, transits, campaigns) are foreseen ?

• Do we need an end-of-life scenario for EIT in case a final shutdown is scheduled ?
  (identification of possible innovative and achievable science targets, instrumental requirements, risks, duration and chronology of "exotic", observing sequences).

Now, go to see the agenda and the particiants list. If your name appears in the agenda, then please check the title and let us now know if you need anything more than a simple overhead projector (slides, PC, ...).

We would also like to encourage people to bring along posters that were recently presented elsewhere. If you can send us the files (postscript, powerpoint, ...) of your presentation per e-mail, the latest on Thuesday May 9, then we'll take care that everybody gets a hardcopy.

See you in Brussels,

The LOC team : David Berghmans, Frederic Clette, Pierre Cugnon, Jean-Rene Gabryl, Jean-Francois Hochedez, Hilde Langenaken, Christelle Michaux, Erwin Verwichte