On the co-alignment of solar telescopes. A new approach to solar pointing

Helioseismological measurements require long observing times and thus may be adversely affected by lateral image drifts as caused by pointing instabilities. At the Vacuum Tower Telescope VTT, Tenerife we have recorded drift values of up to 5" per hour under unstable thermal conditions (dome opening, strong day-to-day thermal gradients). Typically drifts of 0.5" – 1.0" per hour may be encountered under more favorable conditions.

Past experience has shown that most high-resolution solar telescopes may be affected by this problem to some degree. This inherent shortcoming of solar pointing is caused by the fact that the guiding loop can be closed only within the guiding beam but not within the telescope's main beam.

We have developed a new approach to this problem. We correlate continuum brightness patterns observed from within the telescope main beam with patterns originating from a full disk telescope. We show that brightness patterns of sufficient size are unique with respect to solar location at any instant of time and may serve as a location identifier. We make use of the fact that averaged location information of solar structures is invariant with respect to telescope resolution. We have carried out tests at the VTT together with SDO. We have used SDO as a full disk reference. We were able to reduce lateral image drifts by an order of magnitude.