Development of solar scintillometer

Abstract

The index of scintillation measurement is a good parameter to compare different sites for image quality or ‘seeing’. We have developed a scintillometer, which is deployed on the high resolution SPAR telescope in the island site of Udaipur Solar Observatory, for the site characterization to specify the proposed MAST (Multi Application Solar Telescope). The scintillometer consists of a miniature telescope, termed as micro telescope (4 mm aperture, 15 mm focal length) mounted on a drive which tracks the Sun continuously, associated amplifiers and a data acquisition system. A photodiode is used as the detector. The telescope along with detector was obtained from National Solar Observatory (NSO), and is similar to the one used for Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) site survey. At USO we developed the amplifier and data acquisition system for the scintillometer. A 24-bit analog to digital converter based system was designed, assembled, tested and used as the data acquisition system (DAS). In this paper, we discuss the instrumentation and present the initial results.