2022, Quintero Noda, C., Schlichenmaier, R., Bellot Rubio, L.R., Löfdahl, M.G., Khomenko, E., Jurčák, J., Leenaarts, J., Kuckein, C., González Manrique, S.J., Gunár, S., Nelson, C.J., Giovannelli, L., González, F., González, J.B., González-Cava, J.M., González García, M., Gömöry, P., Gracia, F., Grauf, B., Greco, V., Grivel, C., de la Cruz Rodríguez, J., Guerreiro, N., Guglielmino, S.L., Hammerschlag, R., Hanslmeier, A., Hansteen, V., Heinzel, P., Hernández-Delgado, A., Hernández Suárez, E., Hidalgo, S.L., Hill, F., Tziotziou, K., Hizberger, J., Hofmeister, S., Jägers, A., Janett, G., Jarolim, R., Jess, D., Jiménez Mejías, D., Jolissaint, L., Kamlah, R., Kapitán, J., Tsiropoula, G., Kašparová, J., Keller, C.U., Kentischer, T., Kiselman, D., Kleint, L., Klvana, M., Kontogiannis, I., Krishnappa, N., Kučera, A., Labrosse, N., Aulanier, G., Lagg, A., Landi Degl’Innocenti, E., Langlois, M., Lafon, M., Laforgue, D., Le Men, C., Lepori, B., Lepreti, F., Lindberg, B., Lilje, P.B., Aboudarham, J., López Ariste, A., López Fernández, V.A., López Jiménez, A.C., López López, R., Manso Sainz, R., Marassi, A., Marco de la Rosa, J., Marino, J., Marrero, J., Martín, A., Allegri, D., Martín Gálvez, A., Martín Hernando, Y., Masciadri, E., Martínez González, M., Matta-Gómez, A., Mato, A., Mathioudakis, M., Matthews, S., Mein, P., Merlos García, F., Alsina Ballester, E., Moity, J., Montilla, I., Molinaro, M., Molodij, G., Montoya, L.M., Munari, M., Murabito, M., Núñez Cagigal, M., Oliviero, M., Orozco Suárez, D., Amans, J.P., Ortiz, A., Padilla-Hernández, C., Paéz Mañá, E., Paletou, F., Pancorbo, J., Pastor Cañedo, A., Pastor Yabar, A., Peat, A.W., Pedichini, F., Peixinho, N., Asensio Ramos, A., Peñate, J., Pérez de Taoro, A., Peter, H., Petrovay, K., Piazzesi, R., Pietropaolo, E., Pleier, O., Poedts, S., Pötzi, W., Podladchikova, T., Bailén, F.J., Prieto, G., Quintero Nehrkorn, J., Ramelli, R., Ramos Sapena, Y., Rasilla, J.L., Reardon, K., Rebolo, R., Regalado Olivares, S., Reyes García-Talavera, M., Riethmüller, T.L., Balaguer, M., Rimmele, T., Rodríguez Delgado, H., Rodríguez González, N., Rodríguez-Losada, J.A., Rodríguez Ramos, L.F., Romano, P., Roth, M., Rouppe van der Voort, L., Rudawy, P., Ruiz de Galarreta, C., Baldini, V., Rybák, J., Salvade, A., Sánchez-Capuchino, J., Sánchez Rodríguez, M.L., Sangiorgi, M., Sayède, F., Scharmer, G., Scheiffelen, T., Schmidt, W., Schmieder, B., Balthasar, H., Scirè, C., Scuderi, S., Siegel, B., Sigwarth, M., Simões, P.J.A., Snik, F., Sliepen, G., Sobotka, M., Socas-Navarro, H., Sola La Serna, P., Barata, T., Solanki, S. K., Soler Trujillo, M., Soltau, D., Sordini, A., Sosa Méndez, A., Stangalini, M., Steiner, O., Stenflo, J.O., Štěpán, J., Strassmeier, K.G., Barczynski, K., Sudar, D., Suematsu, Y., Sütterlin, P., Tallon, M., Temmer, M., Tenegi, F., Tritschler, A., Trujillo Bueno, J., Turchi, A., Utz, D., Barreto Cabrera, M., van Harten, G., van Noort, M., van Werkhoven, T., Vansintjan, R., Vaz Cedillo, J.J., Vega Reyes, N., Verma, M., Veronig, A.M., Viavattene, G., Vitas, N., Baur, A., Vögler, A., von der Lühe, O., Volkmer, R., Waldmann, T.A., Walton, D., Wisniewska, A., Zeman, J., Zeuner, F., Zhang, L.Q., Zuccarello, F., Béchet, C., Collados, M., Beck, C., Belío-Asín, M., Bello-González, N., Belluzzi, L., Bentley, R.D., Berdyugina, S.V., Berghmans, D., Berlicki, A., Berrilli, F., Berkefeld, T., Bettonvil, F., Bianda, M., Bienes Pérez, J., Bonaque-González, S., Brajša, R., Bommier, V., Bourdin, P.-A., Burgos Martín, J., Calchetti, D., Calcines, A., Calvo Tovar, J., Campbell, R.J., Carballo-Martín, Y., Carbone, V., Carlin, E.S., Carlsson, M., Castro López, J., Cavaller, L., Cavallini, F., Cauzzi, G., Cecconi, M., Chulani, H.M., Cirami, R., Consolini, G., Coretti, I., Cosentino, R., Cózar-Castellano, J., Dalmasse, K., Danilovic, S., De Juan Ovelar, M., Del Moro, D., del Pino Alemán, T., del Toro Iniesta, J. C., Denker, C., Dhara, S.K., Di Marcantonio, P., Díaz Baso, C.J., Diercke, A., Dineva, E., Díaz-García, J.J., Doerr, H.-P., Doyle, G., Erdelyi, R., Ermolli, I., Escobar Rodríguez, A., Esteban Pozuelo, S., Faurobert, M., Felipe, T., Feller, A., Feijoo Amoedo, N., Femenía Castellá, B., Fernandes, J., Ferro Rodríguez, I., Figueroa, I., Fletcher, L., Franco Ordovas, A., Gafeira, R., Gardenghi, R., Gelly, B., Giorgi, F., Gisler, D.

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a project aimed at studying the magnetic connectivity of the solar atmosphere, from the deep photosphere to the upper chromosphere. Its design combines the knowledge and expertise gathered by the European solar physics community during the construction and operation of state-of-the-art solar telescopes operating in visible and near-infrared wavelengths: the Swedish 1m Solar Telescope, the German Vacuum Tower Telescope and GREGOR, the French Télescope Héliographique pour l'Étude du Magnétisme et des Instabilités Solaires, and the Dutch Open Telescope. With its 4.2 m primary mirror and an open configuration, EST will become the most powerful European ground-based facility to study the Sun in the coming decades in the visible and near-infrared bands. EST uses the most innovative technological advances: the first adaptive secondary mirror ever used in a solar telescope, a complex multi-conjugate adaptive optics with deformable mirrors that form part of the optical design in a natural way, a polarimetrically compensated telescope design that eliminates the complex temporal variation and wavelength dependence of the telescope Mueller matrix, and an instrument suite containing several (etalon-based) tunable imaging spectropolarimeters and several integral field unit spectropolarimeters. This publication summarises some fundamental science questions that can be addressed with the telescope, together with a complete description of its major subsystems.

2021, Hill, Gary J., Lee, Hanshin, MacQueen, Phillip J., Kelz, Andreas, Drory, Niv, Vattiat, Brian L., Good, John M., Ramsey, Jason, Kriel, Herman, Peterson, Trent, DePoy, D. L., Gebhardt, Karl, Marshall, J. L., Tuttle, Sarah E., Bauer, Svend M., Chonis, Taylor S., Fabricius, Maximilian H., Froning, Cynthia, Häuser, Marco, Indahl, Briana L., Jahn, Thomas, Landriau, Martin, Leck, Ron, Montesano, Francesco, Prochaska, Travis, Snigula, Jan M., Zeimann, Greg, Bryant, Randy, Damm, George, Fowler, J. R., Janowiecki, Steven, Martin, Jerry, Mrozinski, Emily, Odewahn, Stephen, Rostopchin, Sergey, Shetrone, Matthew, Spencer, Renny, Mentuch Cooper, Erin, Armandroff, Taft, Bender, Ralf, Dalton, Gavin, Hopp, Ulrich, Komatsu, Eiichiro, Nicklas, Harald, Ramsey, Lawrence W., Roth, Martin M., Schneider, Donald P., Sneden, Chris, Steinmetz, Matthias

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is undertaking a blind wide-field low-resolution spectroscopic survey of 540 deg2 of sky to identify and derive redshifts for a million Lyα-emitting galaxies in the redshift range 1.9 < z < 3.5. The ultimate goal is to measure the expansion rate of the universe at this epoch, to sharply constrain cosmological parameters and thus the nature of dark energy. A major multiyear Wide-Field Upgrade (WFU) of the HET was completed in 2016 that substantially increased the field of view to 22′ diameter and the pupil to 10 m, by replacing the optical corrector, tracker, and Prime Focus Instrument Package and by developing a new telescope control system. The new, wide-field HET now feeds the Visible Integral-field Replicable Unit Spectrograph (VIRUS), a new low-resolution integral-field spectrograph (LRS2), and the Habitable Zone Planet Finder, a precision near-infrared radial velocity spectrograph. VIRUS consists of 156 identical spectrographs fed by almost 35,000 fibers in 78 integral-field units arrayed at the focus of the upgraded HET. VIRUS operates in a bandpass of 3500-5500 Å with resolving power R ≃ 800. VIRUS is the first example of large-scale replication applied to instrumentation in optical astronomy to achieve spectroscopic surveys of very large areas of sky. This paper presents technical details of the HET WFU and VIRUS, as flowed down from the HETDEX science requirements, along with experience from commissioning this major telescope upgrade and the innovative instrumentation suite for HETDEX.

2021, Benoît, Aurélien, Pike, Fraser A., Sharma, Tarun K., MacLachlan, David G., Dinkelaker, Aline N., Nayak, Abani S., Madhav, Kalaga, Roth, Martin M., Labadie, Lucas, Pedretti, Ettore, Brummelaar, Theo A. ten, Scott, Nic, Coudé du Foresto, Vincent, Thomson, Robert R.

We present the fabrication and characterization of 3 dB asymmetric directional couplers for the astronomical K-band at wavelengths between 2.0 and 2.4 µm. The couplers were fabricated in commercial Infrasil silica glass using an ultrafast laser operating at 1030 nm. After optimizing the fabrication parameters, the insertion losses of straight single-mode waveguides were measured to be ∼1.2±0.5dB across the full K-band. We investigate the development of asymmetric 3 dB directional couplers by varying the coupler interaction lengths and by varying the width of one of the waveguide cores to detune the propagation constants of the coupled modes. In this manner, we demonstrate that ultrafast laser inscription is capable of fabricating asymmetric 3 dB directional couplers for future applications in K-band stellar interferometry. Finally, we demonstrate that our couplers exhibit an interferometric fringe contrast of >90%. This technology paves the path for the development of a two-telescope K-band integrated optic beam combiner for interferometry to replace the existing beam combiner (MONA) in Jouvence of the Fiber Linked Unit for Recombination (JouFLU) at the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) telescope array.

2021, Dabrowski, Bartosz, Flisek, Paweł, Mikuła, Katarzyna, Froń, Adam, Vocks, Christian, Magdalenić, Jasmina, Krankowski, Andrzej, Zhang, PeiJin, Zucca, Pietro, Mann, Gottfried

We present the observations of two type III solar radio events performed with LOFAR (LOw-Frequency ARray) station in Bałdy (PL612), Poland in single mode. The first event occurred on 20th August 2017 and the second one on 9th September 2017. Solar dynamic spectra were recorded in the 10 MHz up to 90 MHz frequency band. Together with the wide frequency bandwidth LOFAR telescope (with single station used) provides also high frequency and high sensitivity observations. Additionally to LOFAR observations, the data recorded by instruments on boards of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in the UV spectral range complement observations in the radio field. Unfortunately, only the radio event from 9th September 2017 was observed by both satellites. Our study shows that the LOFAR single station observations, in combination with observations at other wavelengths can be very useful for better understanding of the environment in which the type III radio events occur.

2021, Nayak, Abani Shankar, Labadie, Lucas, Sharma, Tarun Kumar, Piacentini, Simone, Corrielli, Giacomo, Osellame, Roberto, Gendron, Éric, Buey, Jean-Tristan M., Chemla, Fanny, Cohen, Mathieu, Bharmal, Nazim A., Bardou, Lisa F., Staykov, Lazar, Osborn, James, Morris, Timothy J., Pedretti, Ettore, Dinkelaker, Aline N., Madhav, Kalaga V., Roth, Martin M.

We present the first on-sky results of a four-telescope integrated optics discrete beam combiner (DBC) tested at the 4.2mWilliamHerschel Telescope. The device consists of a four-input pupil remapper followed by a DBC and a 23-output reformatter. The whole device was written monolithically in a single alumino-borosilicate substrate using ultrafast laser inscription. The device was operated at astronomical H-band (1.6 μm), and a deformable mirror along with a microlens array was used to inject stellar photons into the device. We report the measured visibility amplitudes and closure phases obtained on Vega and Altair that are retrieved using the calibrated transfer matrix of the device. While the coherence function can be reconstructed, the on-sky results show significant dispersion from the expected values. Based on the analysis of comparable simulations, we find that such dispersion is largely caused by the limited signal-to-noise ratio of our observations. This constitutes a first step toward an improved validation of theDBCas a possible beam combination scheme for long-baseline interferometry. © 2021 Optical Society of America.