Steve Keil
Plans are being made to operate the National Solar Observatory as an independent observatory that would report directly to the NSF through AURA. NSO and NOAO will continue to share resources to support programs on Kitt Peak and in Tucson, but NSO will conduct its planning, resource allocation, and reporting functions separately from NOAO. NSO will continue operating its current facilities, in support of user and staff research, which are being enhanced with increased capabilities through completion of SOLIS, enhancement of GONG, and—in conjunction with the solar community —development of an Advanced Solar Telescope. Your comments and opinions both on the separation, and on the current and future facilities and capabilities that NSO should provide the user community, are welcome and can be sent to me at skeil@noao.edu.
SOLIS is well into its construction phase and beginning to take delivery on instrument and telescope components. A brief update on the project appears later in this section. NSO recently completed the third RISE/PSPT (Precision Solar Photometric Telescope) instrument and will begin operations at NSO/Sac Peak. The PSPT is designed to measure and identify the sources of solar irradiance changes and to study the solar interior. All three telescopes have been completed. The first was installed in Rome and the second in Hawaii. For an overview of the instrument and design drawings visit http://www.sunspot.noao.edu/PSPT, and for information about the sunRISE program and access to the data visit rise.hao.ucar.edu.
The NSO low-order adaptive optics system is now available for observations at the Dunn Solar Telescope (DST). Two NSO scientists, Thomas Rimmele and Christoph Keller, recently collaborated with John Seldin and Richard Paxman of the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan (ERIM) to obtain very high resolution movies of the vector magnetic field in active regions. The data were obtained by combining NSO's adaptive optics and ZIMPOL polarimetery systems with phase-diversity techniques developed at ERIM. The combined system permits polarimetery at the diffraction limit of the DST. To see some results from the observations, visit our WWW site at http://www.noao.edu/noao/staff/keller/aopds. A nice movie of convection motions in and around a pore is available at http://www.noao.edu/noao/staff/keller/aopds/pds1802.gif . If you download the movie, watch in particular how the bright point in the upper right is pushed around by granulation.
Eric Tatulli has joined the NSO staff to work with Thomas Rimmele for the next 15 months on the adaptive optics program. Eric comes from ONERA in France with Jean-Marc Conan.
