GREGOR Observation Campaign: The Incoming or Part 1


The Sun features and still holds so many secrets that we need additional observations and investigations to understand our heavenly body fully. To contribute to this challenging task also our group took up the task to form an international experienced solar physicist team consisting of researchers from all around the world. Thus we have members from Japan, Europe such as from Germany, Slovakia or Austria (e.g. the PI of the Project) reaching as far as Colombia; In total this forms maybe one of the largest solar observation campaigns happening in this year. The campaign will be carried out on El Teide observatory with two of the main solar observatories in the world in the optical regime, namely the 1.5 m GREGOR telescope, the third largest ground-based aperture solar telescope (two slightly larger ones with ~ 1.6 m exist in the US) situated on Tenerife/Spain and the Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT). This Project is coordinated by the Institute of Physics/IGAM, Karl-Franzens University of Graz under supervision of senior researcher Dr. Dominik Utz, who is also the head of our research group "High Resolution, Simulations & Observations of the Lower Solar Atmosphere". Besides, we got the support of the IRIS spacecraft operated by NASA, as well as the support of the Hinode space telescope (controlled by JAXA/Japan), giving us a wide cover over of the solar atmosphere with different instruments and wavelengths. In total we can count on 10 different Instruments operated from both ground-based and space borne telescopes. Making our campaing most likely to one of the largest solar observation projects in the recent time, using almost 70% of the available scientific high-resolution instrumentation resources within the next two weeks. 

 The GREGOR telescope produces images with a high spatial resolution, covering typically a spatial FOV of photospheric images of 35 000 km. The main objective of our campaign will be the study of the dynamics of small-scale magnetic fields and their interaction with the upper layers of the solar atmosphere such as the chromosphere and corona, as well as the possible linkage to the production of energetic events via so-called magnetic reconnection. Another topic of interest would be the mass transport from the lower atmosphere to the upper atmosphere. The understanding of these features and their corresponding phenomena may give us information about open questions in solar physics such as the coronal heating, spacewather and the interaction between the Earth and Sun (extremely important for e. g. the  Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites or other commercial space-crafts). 

For the selection of the concrete daily target during our campaign we can rely, e.g., on full-disk images obtained from the Kanzelhöhe Observatory of the Karl-Franzens University of Graz wich is lead by Prof. Astrid Veronig. This Extended observational campaign is coordinated by Austria, and co-funded by the Austrian Science Funding Agency (FWF) to which we wish to express our acknowledgements!

 Below you can find some first impressions of the Gregor and VTT telescopes and the team on site!
Missing on the image are Horst and Christoph (both from AIP) and Norbert, who will join us next week (from KU-Leuven)!

Thank you all (all the team members on site, as well as the satellite operator teams) for enabling this great campaign! Fingers crossed for good data!

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