UDAIPUR SOLAR OBSERVATORY
Physical Research Laboratory
Department of Space, Government of India
Telescopes
A 6-foot Razdow telescope, with a 15-cm aperture lens, takes full disk H-alpha synoptic observations of solar activity. For real time monitoring CCD cameras, monitors and a digital image acquistion and processing system have been commissioned.
A 12-foot solar spar with 25-cm aperture telescope have been used for observing small high resolution chromospheric structures with the help of a narrow passband Halle-birefringent filter centered at 6563A H-alpha spectral line.
A Solar Vector Magnetograph (SVM) was developed in-house and installed at the Island site of USO, Udaipur. The magnetograph is basically an imaging sectropolarimeter, which consists of a Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope of 20 cm aperture and a state-of-the-art tunable filter. This filter is designed using an air-gap servo-controlled peizo-tuned Fabry-Perot etalon procured from M/s IC Optical Systems, UK. This Fabry-Perot etalon together with an order-sorting interference filter acts as a spectrometer. The polarimeter consists of two rotatable quartz-waveplates (quarter-wave plates) and Savart plate. The dual output beams from the Savart plate are imaged simultaneously onto a single CCD chip which helps in minimizing the seeing induced errors in polarimetry. Further, the entire optical train is mounted on a German Equatorial mount which directly points and tracks the Sun. Also, the straight (no oblique reflections) and symmetric optical design ensures minimal instrumental polarization. The Fe I 630.25 nm line is used for spectropolarimetry. The instrument became operational in February 2007 and was inaugrated by Dr. G. Madhavan Nair, Chairman, ISRO.
- Coude' Telescope
A 15-cm Zeiss Coude telescope is being operated for feeding light into the Adaptive Optics (AO) lab of USO. The advantage of this telescope is that it tracks the Sun and feeds the solar beam to the sensitive optical arrangement for AO experiment placed on a stationary platform.
- GONG telescope
A milestone was added to USO's history in
October 1995, when it appeared on the world map as an important link in an international project, GONG - Global Oscillations Network Group. USO was selected owing to its excellent observing and sky conditions, as found by the GONG site evaluation which was started in 1986 at USO, along with 15 contending observatories around the world. The GONG system was further upgraded in 2001.The other five sites selected under GONG are located at the Canary islands (Spain), CTIO (Chile), Big Bear (USA), Hawaii (USA), and Learmonth (Australia), for a near continuous 24 hour solar coverage with the aim of probing the solar interior. A sophisticated, 1.5 million dollar, state-of-the-art instrument has been installed at Udaipur under this project. It monitors the Sun automatically, and takes digital velocity images of the sun every minute. The USO data is then combined with the data obtained from other five sites at the central facility located at National Solar Observatory, Tucson, USA. The GONG project promises to unravel several fundamental problems of solar interior and general astrophysics.
P. O. Box 198 , Bari Road, Dewali, Udaipur - 313001, INDIA This page is maintained by A Raja Bayanna
For any querry, please send mail to [email protected].Last updated on Monday April 4 12:09:21 2011.
