Instrumentation for the Advanced Technology Solar Telescope

Rimmele, Thomas R.; Hubbard, Robert P.; Balasubramaniam, K. S.; Berger, Tom; Elmore, David; Gary, G. Allen; Jennings, Don; Keller, Christoph; Kuhn, Jeff; Lin, Haosheng; Mickey, Don; Moretto, Gilberto; Socas-Navarro, Hector; Stenflo, Jan O.; Wang, Haimin
Bibliographical reference

Ground-based Instrumentation for Astronomy. Edited by Alan F. M. Moorwood and Iye Masanori. Proceedings of the SPIE, Volume 5492, pp. 944-957 (2004).

Advertised on:
9
2004
Number of authors
15
IAC number of authors
0
Citations
17
Refereed citations
15
Description
The 4-m aperture Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) is the next generation ground based solar telescope. In this paper we provide an overview of the ATST post-focus instrumentation. The majority of ATST instrumentation is located in an instrument Coude lab facility, where a rotating platform provides image de-rotation. A high order adaptive optics system delivers a corrected beam to the Coude lab facility. Alternatively, instruments can be mounted at Nasmyth or a small Gregorian area. For example, instruments for observing the faint corona preferably will be mounted at Nasmyth focus where maximum throughput is achieved. In addition, the Nasmyth focus has minimum telescope polarization and minimum stray light. We describe the set of first generation instruments, which include a Visible-Light Broadband Imager (VLBI), Visible and Near-Infrared (NIR) Spectropolarimeters, Visible and NIR Tunable Filters, a Thermal-Infrared Polarimeter & Spectrometer and a UV-Polarimeter. We also discuss unique and efficient approaches to the ATST instrumentation, which builds on the use of common components such as detector systems, polarimetry packages and various opto-mechanical components.