Alignment of Fabry-Pérot Interferometer Plates in a Solar Vector Magnetograph

Abstract

I describe a method for quickly and accurately determining the plate parallelism in a tunable Fabry-Perot interferometer. The method takes advantage of the fact that our Fabry-Perot is installed in a spectropolarimeter: we measure profiles of solar or telluric absorption lines in three differently polarized telescope subapertures and use the residual polarization profiles to determine the plate parallelism error. An example of the error as a function of time during the observing day is also shown; it changes in a consistent way with telescope hour angle but the drift is enough to require frequent adjustment.