The New HELLRIDE at the Vacuum Tower Telescope

Abstract

AbstractA better understanding of the processes involved in the energy transport across the solar atmosphere (e.g., jets, waves) demands more effort towards the observations. Hence, existing instruments may need to be upgraded to gain additional capabilities. To this effect, we conceive an upgrade for the HELioseismic Large Regions Interferometric DEvice (HELLRIDE) instrument at Vacuum Tower Telescope (VTT) to enable the recording of the magnetograms. We present the instrumentation aspects of this development consisting of integrating a liquid crystal-based dual-beam polarimeter with the existing instrument, compatible new hardware and software with the improved operating scheme, and the first observations to verify its functionality. The new HELLRIDE now observes a field of view of $90^{\prime \prime } \times 90^{\prime \prime }$ 90 ″ × 90 ″ in four spectral lines, two chromospheric spectral lines in spectroscopy mode and two photospheric spectral lines in spectropolarimetry mode, with a cadence of 40 seconds. The increased complexity of the system, as well as the data, calls for the creation of a rigorous data processing pipeline, which is currently under development.