No Arabic abstract
The New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) is a 1 meter vacuum solar telescope that aims to observe the fine structures on the Sun. The main tasks of NVST are high resolution imaging and spectral observations, including the measurements of solar magnetic field. NVST is the primary ground-based facility of Chinese solar community in this solar cycle. It is located by the Fuxian Lake of southwest China, where the seeing is good enough to perform high resolution observations. In this paper, we first introduce the general conditions of Fuxian Solar Observatory and the primary science cases of NVST. Then, the basic structures of this telescope and instruments are described in detail. Finally, some typical high resolution data of solar photosphere and chromosphere are also shown.
Prominence plumes are evacuated upflows that emerge from bubbles below prominences, whose formation mechanism is still unclear. Here we present a detailed study of plumes in a quiescent prominence using the high-resolution H-alpha filtergrams at the line center as well as line wing at +/-0.4 angstrom from the New Vacuum Solar Telescope. Enhancements of brightening, blue shifts, and turbulence at the fronts of plumes are found during their formation. Some large plumes split at their heads and finger-shaped structures are formed between them. Blue-shifted flows along the bubble-prominence interface are found before and during the plume formation. Our observations are consistent with the hypothesis that prominence plumes are related to coupled Kelvin-Helmholtz and Rayleigh-Taylor (KH/RT) instabilities. Plume splittings and fingers are evidence of RT instability, and the flows may increase the growth rate of KH/RT instabilities. However, the significant turbulence at plume fronts may suggest that the RT instability is triggered by the plumes penetrating into the prominence. In this scenario, extra mechanisms are necessary to drive the plumes.
Context. Remote sensing of weak and small-scale solar magnetic fields is of utmost relevance for a number of important open questions in solar physics. This requires the acquisition of spectropolarimetric data with high spatial resolution (0.1 arcsec) and low noise (1e-3 to 1e-5 of the continuum intensity). The main limitations to obtain these measurements from the ground, are the degradation of the image resolution produced by atmospheric seeing and the seeing-induced crosstalk (SIC). Aims. We introduce the prototype of the Fast Solar Polarimeter (FSP), a new ground-based, high-cadence polarimeter that tackles the above-mentioned limitations by producing data that are optimally suited for the application of post-facto image restoration, and by operating at a modulation frequency of 100 Hz to reduce SIC. Results. The pnCCD camera reaches 400 fps while keeping a high duty cycle (98.6 %) and very low noise (4.94 erms). The modulator is optimized to have high (> 80%) total polarimetric efficiency in the visible spectral range. This allows FSP to acquire 100 photon-noise-limited, full-Stokes measurements per second. We found that the seeing induced signals present in narrow-band, non-modulated, quiet-sun measurements are (a) lower than the noise (7e-5) after integrating 7.66 min, (b) lower than the noise (2.3e-4) after integrating 1.16 min and (c) slightly above the noise (4e-3) after restoring case (b) by means of a multi-object multi-frame blind deconvolution. In addition, we demonstrate that by using only narrow-band images (with low SNR of 13.9) of an active region, we can obtain one complete set of high-quality restored measurements about every 2 s.
In this paper we illustrate the technique used by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope to increase the spatial resolution of two-dimensional (2D) solar spectroscopy observation involving two dimensions of space and one of wavelength. Without an image stabilizer at the NVST, a large scale wobble motion is present during the spatial scanning, whose instantaneous amplitude could reach up to 1.3 due to the earths atmosphere and the precision of the telescope guiding system, and seriously decreases the spatial resolution of 2D spatial maps composed with the scanning spectra. We make the following effort to resolve this problem: the imaging system (e.g., the TiO-band) is used to record and detect the displacement vectors of solar image motion during the raster scan, in both the slit and scanning directions. The spectral data (e.g., the Ha line) which are originally obtained in time sequence are corrected and re-arranged in space according to those displacement vectors. Raster scans are carried out in several active regions with different seeing conditions (two rasters are illustrated in this paper). Given a certain spatial sample and temporal resolution, the spatial resolution of the composed 2D map could be close to that of the slit-jaw image. The resulting quality after correction is quantitatively evaluated with two methods. Two-dimensional physical quantity, such as the line-of-sight velocities in multi-layer of the solar atmosphere, is also inferred demonstrating the effect of this technique.
A huge amount of data has been acquired with the GREGOR Fabry-Perot Interferometer (GFPI), large-format facility cameras, and since 2016 with the High-resolution Fast Imager (HiFI). These data are processed in standardized procedures with the aim of providing science-ready data for the solar physics community. For this purpose, we have developed a user-friendly data reduction pipeline called sTools based on the Interactive Data Language (IDL) and licensed under creative commons license. The pipeline delivers reduced and image-reconstructed data with a minimum of user interaction. Furthermore, quick-look data are generated as well as a webpage with an overview of the observations and their statistics. All the processed data are stored online at the GREGOR GFPI and HiFI data archive of the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP). The principles of the pipeline are presented together with selected high-resolution spectral scans and images processed with sTools.
PEPSI is the bench-mounted, two-arm, fibre-fed and stabilized Potsdam Echelle Polarimetric and Spectroscopic Instrument for the 2x8.4 m Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). Three spectral resolutions of either 43 000, 120 000 or 270 000 can cover the entire optical/red wavelength range from 383 to 907 nm in three exposures. Two 10.3kx10.3k CCDs with 9-{mu}m pixels and peak quantum efficiencies of 96 % record a total of 92 echelle orders. We introduce a new variant of a wave-guide image slicer with 3, 5, and 7 slices and peak efficiencies between 96 %. A total of six cross dispersers cover the six wavelength settings of the spectrograph, two of them always simultaneously. These are made of a VPH-grating sandwiched by two prisms. The peak efficiency of the system, including the telescope, is 15% at 650 nm, and still 11% and 10% at 390 nm and 900 nm, respectively. In combination with the 110 m2 light-collecting capability of the LBT, we expect a limiting magnitude of 20th mag in V in the low-resolution mode. The R=120 000 mode can also be used with two, dual-beam Stokes IQUV polarimeters. The 270 000-mode is made possible with the 7-slice image slicer and a 100- {mu}m fibre through a projected sky aperture of 0.74, comparable to the median seeing of the LBT site. The 43000-mode with 12-pixel sampling per resolution element is our bad seeing or faint-object mode. Any of the three resolution modes can either be used with sky fibers for simultaneous sky exposures or with light from a stabilized Fabry-Perot etalon for ultra-precise radial velocities. CCD-image processing is performed with the dedicated data-reduction and analysis package PEPSI-S4S. A solar feed makes use of PEPSI during day time and a 500-m feed from the 1.8 m VATT can be used when the LBT is busy otherwise. In this paper, we present the basic instrument design, its realization, and its characteristics.