Solar surveillance with CLIMSO: instrumentation, database and on-going developments

Abstract

CLIMSO is a suite of solar telescopes installed at Pic du Midi observatory in the southwest of France. It consists of two refractors that image the full solar disk in Hα and CaII K, and two coronagraphs that capture the prominences and ejections of chromospheric matter in Hα and HeI. Synoptic observations are carried out since 2007 and they follow those of previous instruments. CLIMSO, together with its predecessors, offer a temporal coverage of several solar cycles. With a direct access to its images, CLIMSO contributes to real time monitoring of the Sun. For that matter, the national research council for astrophysics (CNRS/INSU) has labelled CLIMSO as a national observation service for “surveillance of the Sun and the terrestrial space environment”. Products, under the form of images, movies or data files, are available via the CLIMSO DataBase. In this paper, we present the current instrumental configuration; we detail the available products and show how to access them; we mention some possible applications for solar and space weather; and finally, we evoke developments underway, both numerical to valorise our data, and instrumental to offer more and better capabilities.

Keywords

• sun
• observation
• telescopes
• coronagraphs
• database