Solar limb faculae

We observe solar limb faculae at an unprecedented spatial resolution with the new 1m Swedish Solar Telescope SST on La Palma. Speckle-reconstructed images are used to study 4475 limb facular grains simultaneously in the 430 nm G-band and the 587.5 +/- 1.5 continuum up to only 1 '' from the limb ( cos theta = 0.05). No systematic contrast decrease is found even a few arcsec from the solar limb. The facular grains appear to be "projected" on the limb-side neighboring granules; approaching the disc center, the corresponding features occur as inter-granular G-band bright points. Independently, we took spectra with the French-Italian THEMIS telescope on Tenerife and find that the known "line-gap effect" from disc center disappears near the limb. Here, the facular continuum is enhanced whereas the normalized profiles are unchanged with respect to the undisturbed neighborhood.