Swedish Solar Telescope

The Swedish Solar Telescope ( SST short ) is a telescope to observe the Sun with an opening of a meter in diameter. It is located in the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on La Palma. It is operated by the Institute for Solar Physics of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The telescope has an opening width of 98 cm. Thus, it is built after the 1895 Yerkes refractor, the second largest refracting telescope in the world. A technical problem which limits the use of the telescope of Yerkes and other large telescopes, is the deformation under its own weight. The SST this error is minimized by the actual telescope is standing vertically built into a tower. The roof of the building approximately 30 meters high on one of the sun -tracking movement of the sun is led to the inside of Zölostaten tower telescope.

The interior of the telescope is heated by the solar radiation. A resultant convection of air inside the telescope would affect the resolution. To circumvent this limitation, the tube of the SST is evacuated.

The telescope is equipped with an adaptive optics system, which analyzes the image of the sun 1000 times per second to compensate for the atmospheric turbulence in the atmosphere. The control of adaptive optics represents a particular challenge When observing the night sky fixed stars, or an artificial star can be used as a reference. On the day but these are eclipsed. Therefore serve for solar observation details of the photosphere of the sun as compared image. Unlike star whose image is not point-like. Moreover, they are not completely stationary. Therefore, the full image of the sun for the calculation of the correction by the adaptive optics is brought drawn. This technique was first used at the Sacramento Peak Solar Observatory in the United States and developed for the previous telescope of the SST.