SUNRISE: instrument, mission, data, and first results

SK Solanki, P Barthol, S Danilovic… - The Astrophysical …, 2010 - iopscience.iop.org
The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2010iopscience.iop.org
The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1 m aperture Gregory telescope,
a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system, and further
infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise yielded high-quality data that revealed the
structure, dynamics, and evolution of solar convection, oscillations, and magnetic fields at a
resolution of around 100 km in the quiet Sun. After a brief description of instruments and
data, the first qualitative results are presented. In contrast to earlier observations, we clearly …
Abstract
The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1 m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system, and further infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise yielded high-quality data that revealed the structure, dynamics, and evolution of solar convection, oscillations, and magnetic fields at a resolution of around 100 km in the quiet Sun. After a brief description of instruments and data, the first qualitative results are presented. In contrast to earlier observations, we clearly see granulation at 214 nm. Images in Ca ii H display narrow, short-lived dark intergranular lanes between the bright edges of granules. The very small-scale, mixed-polarity internetwork fields are found to be highly dynamic. A significant increase in detectable magnetic flux is found after phase-diversity-related reconstruction of polarization maps, indicating that the polarities are mixed right down to the spatial resolution limit and probably beyond.
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