The observing time is usually spread over three two-week campaigns from spring until autumn. These campaigns are very much a team effort, and many members from the RoCS team participate in these observations. All observations are coordinated with the IRIS satellite, which involves daily interaction with the IRIS planners to decide which target to observe and which observing program to run.
In the past few years, we have also coordinated with ESA's Solar Orbiter mission. The Sun has been very active in recent years, and we have successfully observed flares and other eruptive phenomena in active regions.
The observations with IRIS from space gives us access to the higher parts of the solar atmosphere: the upper chromosphere and transition region. With the SST, we can observe the deeper parts of the atmosphere — the photosphere and lower chromosphere — in extreme detail. Solar Orbiter can observe the solar corona at extremely high spatial and temporal resolution. Coordinated observations with all these telescopes and instruments give a more complete view of the solar atmosphere than one can achieve with a single instrument alone.
Besides planning and acquiring new observations, the reduction and data processing of current and earlier observations are among the main activities of the observations group. We employ image restoration techniques to mitigate the effect of atmospheric turbulence (so-called “seeing”) on the data quality.
Like all modern telescopes, the SST employs an adaptive optics system to correct for seeing in real time during the observations. Adaptive optics provides a significant improvement in data quality, but post-facto image restoration is mandatory to attenuate residual seeing deformations. With image restoration, high data quality can be achieved over a larger field of view and over longer periods of time. Besides considerable computing power and data storage capacity, data reduction requires a fair amount of manpower and is handled as a team effort. We collaborate with the SST staff in Stockholm and La Palma to improve, optimise and further develop the data processing pipelines for the CRISP and CHROMIS instruments.
