Development of SCIDAR for solar observations

Abstract

In nighttime astronomy Vernin and co-workers have proposed and subsequently developed the so-called SCIDAR (SCIntillation Detection And Ranging) technique to probe Cn2(h). It makes use of the double shadow band (or scintillation) pattern formed on a telescope aperture by the two components of a binary star. We are developing a variant of this technique for solar astronomy. It uses pairs of small apertures on the solar image with diameters smaller than the isoplanatic patch (“artificial double stars”). Within the isoplanatic patch the complex amplitude (intensity and phase) of the atmospheric wavefront disturbances is constant. Solar SCIDAR (or S-SCIDAR) makes use of this. We will present the results of the first (inconclusive) experiments of this S-SCIDAR technique as used on the 76 cm aperture Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) and the 152 cm aperture McMath-Pierce facility (McM-P) of the US National Solar Observatory. It uses a 45 x 45 lenslet array placed in the solar image. The size of the lenslets corresponds to 2.25 x 2.25 arcsec at the DST and 1.67 x 1.67 arcsec at the McM-P; the separation of lenslet pairs on the DST (and hence of the separations of the artificial double stars) ranges from 2.25 arcsec to 140 arcsec. The lenslet array forms an array of pupil images on a CCD detector.