Fundación Galileo Galilei - INAF Telescopio Nazionale Galileo 28°45'14.4N 17°53'20.6W 2387.2m A.S.L.

LOCNES Telescope catched its first solar photons

On May 10th, a glorious blue-sky day, the LOw-Cost NIR Extended Solar (LOCNES) telescope saw its first scientific light.

LOCNES is a 2 inch solar telescope installed on the dome of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo. It feeds the near infrared (NIR) spectrograph GIANO-B with light from the Sun using a patch of 40 m of optical fiber. LOCNES has been designed to obtain high signal-to-noise ratio spectra of the Sun-as-a-star, namely, with no spatial information, as is typically the case for all other stars. This is a completely new area of investigation that will provide timely results to improve the search for telluric planets.

The scientific team making use of this telescope will be able to extract several disk integrated activity indicators and mean magnetic field measurements for the Sun in the NIR. Such an approach will allow a better understanding of the origin of activity-induced radial velocity (RV) variations and will help to improve the techniques for their correction.

Present at the commissioning of the instrument were the PI: Riccardo Claudi (INAF- Astronomical Observatory of Padova) and the other team members: Emanuele Pace (Dip. di Fisica ed Astronomia dell’ Università degli studi di Firenze), Lorenzo Cabona (INAF- Astronomical Observatory of Padova), Scige John Liu (INAF-IAPS Roma), Avet Harutyunyan (Fundación Galileo Galilei-Spain), and the Director of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, Adriano Ghedina. The whole LOCNES Team is completed by several members of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo staff who contributed to pursue this result.

LOCNE Team

The commissioning group in the control room of the TNG. From the left: A.Ghedina, R.Claudi, L.Cabona, S.Liu, A.Harutyunyan, E.Pace.

Laptop screen photo

One of the first spectra of the Sun in the NIR, taken with GIANO-B and LOCNES

Sun spectra screenshot

One of the first spectra of the Sun in the NIR, taken with GIANO-B and LOCNES