High-resolution observations of the solar photosphere and chromosphere

Abstract

Observations of the sun are almost always impaired by the turbulent motion of air in Earth's atmosphere. The turbulence would limit the theoretical resolution of modern large telescopes to that of amateur telescopes without additional tools.Today however, high-resolution data of the Sun are necessary to invesitgate its small-scale structure. This structure is likely to be connected to the radially outward increasing temparature distribution of the solar atmosphere. An introduction into further details of this topic that has also been the motivation for this work is presented in Chapt. 1. A theory of atmospheric turbulence that builds the basis for several results of this work is described in Chapt. 2. Here, two modern tools to enhance the resolution of groundbased observations are reviewed, on the one hand adaptive optics (AO) systems and on the other hand speckle interferometry. Until recently, these two techniques were only used separately. In Chapt. 3 the necessary modifications for analytical models of transfer functions are developed that include the changes made by an AO system to the incoming wave front, thus making a combination of AO systems and speckle interferometry possible ...