Coregistered TRACE 1600 Å images from the 2000 March 17 M1.1 flare. The images clearly show the development of the flare ribbon prior to the onset of the hard X‐ray emission, which occurred at about 11:10 UT. The images are ﹩85^{\prime \prime }\times 85^{\prime \prime }﹩ in area, scaled logarithmically from 10² to 10⁴ DN s⁻¹ and rotated so that north is to the left and west is up. The color table has been reversed so that bright regions are dark. Light curves for the points marked with circles are shown in Fig. 2. Only one in every 15 available images is shown.