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I'm actually interested in cases of cross-discipline data re-use.

I know that the SOHO/LASCO coronographs are used for comet finding, that solar telescopes were used to get information about Venus's atmosphere during its solar transit in 2004, and STEREO were rolled to try to look at L4 and L5.

But do the night-time or planetary communities use the images for anything else? For example, does STEREO's separation from Earth make the coronographs or heliospheric imagers useful for any triangulation, or are the exposure times or spatial resolution problematic, or is the relative separation insignificant in the grand scheme of things?

Update: I'm not interested in space weather or for warnings about when to put satellites into 'safe mode'... I'm more interested if the low-level telescope data is useful.

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I've been pondering your question for a couple of days, and the only answer I can think of from my own experience is that Coronal Mass Ejections trigger aurora on Earth, and aurora can seriously interfere with night-time observations of faint objects. I'm thinking of an occasion when I travelled to an extremely dark site in Algonquin Park and set up for a night of deep sky observing, only to be blasted by a brilliant aurora display!

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Thanks ... Yes, I guess this isn't quite like the space weather case where it's a warning against observing, but a specific notification to start observing. –  Joe Jun 13 '11 at 20:05

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