Speckle Masking Imaging of Sunspots and Pores

Abstract

In recent years, speckle interferometry has been successfully applied to various solar phenomena and provides a powerful tool to study solar small-scale structures. The present investigation lays special emphasis on sunspots and sunspot pores. The observations have been performed with the Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT) at the Observatorio del Teide (Tenerife) in the years from 1992 to 1994. Time series of high-spatial-resolution observations reveal the highly dynamical evolution of sunspot fine structures such as umbral dots, penumbral grains or the small-scale brightenings in the vicinity of sunspots observed in the wings of strong chromospheric absorption lines (moustache phenomenon). The reconstructed images show small-scale structures close to the telescopic diffraction limit of 0.16″ at 550 nm. Furthermore, the high transmission of a Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) as the principal optical element of a two-dimensional spectrometer allows one to reconstruct directly images taken within a passband of 0.014 nm.