New Mauna Loa coronagraph systems

Abstract

A new set of instruments, consisting of two coronagraph systems, has been installed and is operating at the Mauna Loa Observing Station, Hawaii, operated by the High Altitude Observatory of Boulder, Colorado. The instruments are the 23-cm objective Mark III K-coronameter (K-III) system, a photoelectric instrument used to observe the inner solar corona from 1.2 R(0) to 2.2 R(0) and the 12.5-cm objective Prominence Monitor system used for the detection of H(alpha) limb activity. New features of the K-coronameter system include the use of achromatic wave plates for wide bandpass operation and linear diode array detectors. Raster scans of the coronal image are obtained in 1.5 min for a critical sampling scheme of 20-sec of arc resolution (10 x 10-sec of arc pixels) in the coronal p(B) image. This represents a 350 information gain factor for each detection channel when compared with the previous Mauna Loa K-coronameters.