The figure is the "first light" spectrum of the UVCS/Soho Lyman-alpha channel. The observation is a 40 arcminute strip of the corona parallel to the east limb tangent and centered at about 3 solar radii from sun-center. The spectral line is HI Lyman-alpha at a wavelength of 121.6 nanometers. The brightest part is from a streamer that is also being observed by the LASCO instrument.

The background demonstrates the low dark rate and stray light of the instrument--fewer than 10 counts per second shared by 360,000 picture elements.