High resolution EUV structure of the chromosphere-corona transition region above a sunspot

Rocket observations are reported for a sunspot at high spatial and spectral resolution in the extreme ultraviolet region (EUV) between 1170 and 1715 A. The instrument and data reduction are described, and the appearance of the sunspot features in EUV emission lines is presented together with a correlation of the nonthermal velocity field with the Doppler velocity field. For sunspots the shape of the differential emission measure curve shows that the minimum is shifted to lower temperatures by over a factor of two, while the slope on a log-log scale near log of effective temperature equal to 5.3 is increased by a factor of two. This means that the energy balance is dominated by radiative losses from the large amount of transition region plasma, and an upper limit of a million K exists on the extrapolated temperature above the umbra. Static energy balance models of the umbra show that the observed enthalpy flux can balance radiative losses above 30,000 K for a fill factor greater than 0.1. An umbral model is compared with the chromospheric sunspot model of Kneer and Mattig (1978).