The results achieved – The telescope, operated by a German consortium and located in the Teide Observatory in Spain, now allows scientists to detect details on the Sun’s surface with an extension of up to 50 kilometers, or a small fraction of the solar diameter which is equal to 1.4. millions of kilometers.
“This was a very exciting project, but also extremely ambitious. In just one year we completely redesigned the optics, mechanics and electronics to achieve the best possible image quality,” he said. Lucia Kleint, who led the project and German solar telescopes from Tenerife.
Also Svetlana Berdyugina, Professor of the Albert-Ludwig University of Freiburg and Director of the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (Kis), expressed great enthusiasm: “The project was quite risky because these kinds of telescope upgrades usually take years, but the excellent teamwork and meticulous planning have led to success. We now have a powerful tool for solving mysteries about the sun. “
The turning point – An important step forward, which made it possible to achieve this extraordinary result, was made in March of this year, during the lockdown, when the team was stuck at the observatory and had set up the optical laboratory from scratch. The snowstorms that followed, however, prevented solar observations. In July, the team was finally able to obtain the highest resolution images of the Sun ever taken by a European telescope.
The redesign – Telescope optics are extremely complex systems, made up of mirrors, lenses, filters and other optical elements. If even one of the elements that compose them is not perfect, the performance of the whole system suffers. One of the problems that plagued the telescope was astigmatism, which was corrected by replacing two elements with off-axis parabolic mirrors, polished to an accuracy of 6 nanometers (approximately one ten thousandth of the diameter of a hat).
“The new optical design and the new control system of the Gregor telescope allow observations of the solar surface characterized by a resolution that allows you to distinguish objects as small as 50 kilometers,” he explained. Ilaria Ermolli of the INAF of Rome, expert in solar physics, to Media Inaf.
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