“We have just succeeded in acquiring worthy scientific data during 2017 Grand American Total Solar Eclipse on Aug.21”, said Prof. QU Zhongquan, the leader of a Chinese team,  from their observation site in a suburb of Dallas, Oregon.

This team, among one of the hundreds of observation teams pouring into the little town in Oregon for the Grand Solar Eclipse,  is formed by three institutes of China. They are respectively Yunnan Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University and Sichuan University of Science and Engineering. Yunnan Observatories organized this observation.

They brought five telescopes to the observation site. Four telescopes are aimed at measurement of magnetic field of solar corona via spectro-polarimetry and imaging polarimetry or both while the other one targets the accurate measurement of solar radius. Especially, Fiber Arrayed Solar Optical Telescope of the first generation(FASOT-1A) is dedicated to measuring the magnetic field via spectro-imaging polarimetry. This time they have acquired quantitative data to get the exact specific intensity and linear polarization intensities of the famous green line, the strongest coronal line with wavelength of 530.3nm. The magnetic field alignment can be deduced via analyzing the data.

They also obtained precious imaging polarimetry data from other three telescopes. All these data with different filter bandpasses and wavelength bands form an almost complete assembly to reveal the distribution of coronal magnetic field in different scales and field of view.

FASOT-1A telescope,(Image by QU zhongquan)

 Sample modulated image acquired during the totality. The green line is the emission line (bright horizontal wide line in the middle), and the wavelength increases from the bottom to top.

(Image by QU Zhongquan)

Contact:

Prof. QU zhongquan

Yunnan Observatories

Email: zqqu@ynao.ac.cn