On the performance of a dual-beam polarimeter at Kodaikanal Tower Telescope

K. Nagaraju, K. Sankarasubramanian, K. E. Rangarajan, K. B. Ramesh, Jagdev Singh, P. Devendran and Hariharan
Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore 560 034, India
Space Astronomy and Instrumentation Division, ISRO Satellite center, Bangalore 560094, India

Abstract. Calibration and characterization of a dual-beam polarimeter installed at Kodaikanal Tower Telescope (KTT) for spectropolarimetric observations are presented in this paper. It was found that a slit width of 48 μ is optimum for the spectrograph setup at KTT and corresponding spectral resolution is 32.47 m\AA. It was demonstrated that the precision in polarization measurement can be achieved better than 0.1 % by increasing the exposure time. However, the polarimetric calibration accuracy is limited to 0.35% for Stokes Q and U parameters and 0.2% for Stokes V parameter, mainly due to the uncertainty in the retardance of the calibration retarder. A comparison of the magnetic field measurement between the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) onboard Hinode and KTT for an active region was made and a good match was found after spatial smearing of Hinode/SOT measurements by 5.12''.

Keywords: Instrumentation : polarimeter

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