Bibcode
Elmore, David F.; Lin, Haosheng; Socas-Navarro, H.; Jaeggli, Sarah A.
Bibliographical reference
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy III. Edited by McLean, Ian S.; Ramsay, Suzanne K.; Takami, Hideki. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 7735, pp. 77354E-77354E-6 (2010).
Advertised on:
7
2010
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
Spectro-polarimetry plays an important role in the study of solar
magnetism and strongly influences the design of the new generation of
solar telescopes. Calibration of the polarization properties of the
telescope is a critical requirement needed to use these observations to
infer solar magnetic fields. However, the large apertures of these new
telescopes make direct calibration with polarization calibration optics
placed before all the telescope optical elements impractical. It is
therefore desirable to be able to infer the polarization properties of
the telescope optical elements utilizing solar observations themselves.
Taking advantage of the fact that the un-polarized, linearly, and
circularly polarized spectra originating from the Sun are uncorrelated,
we have developed techniques to utilize observations of solar spectra
with redundant combination of the polarization states measured at
several different telescope configurations to infer the polarization
properties of the telescope as a whole and of its optical elements. We
show results of these techniques applied to spectro-plarimetric data
obtained at the Dunn Solar Telescope.