Atmospheric seeing measurements obtained with MISOLFA in the framework of the PICARD Mission

Description

PICARD is a space mission launched in June 2010 to study mainly the geometry of the Sun. The PICARD mission has a ground program consisting mostly in four instruments based at the Calern Observatory (Obser-vatoire de la Côte d'Azur). They allow recording simultaneous solar images and various atmospheric data from ground. The ground instruments consist in the qualification model of the PICARD space instrument (SODISM II: Solar Diameter Imager and Surface Mapper), standard sun-photometers, a pyranometer for estimating a global sky quality index, and MISOLFA a generalized daytime seeing monitor. Indeed, astrometric observations of the Sun using ground-based telescopes need an accurate modeling of optical effects induced by atmospheric turbulence. MISOLFA is founded on the observation of Angle-of-Arrival (AA) fluctuations and allows us to analyze atmospheric turbulence optical effects on measurements performed by SODISM II. It gives estimations of the coherence parameters characterizing wave-fronts degraded by the atmospheric turbulence (Fried parameter r 0 , size of the isoplanatic patch, the spatial coherence outer scale L 0 and atmospheric correlation times). We present in this paper simulations showing how the Fried parameter infered from MISOLFA records can be used to interpret radius measurements extracted from SODISM II images. We show an example of daily and monthly evolution of r 0 and present its statistics over 2 years at Calern Observatory with a global mean value of 3.5cm.

Abstract

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