Calibration of the SST Image Scale Through the Use of Imaging Techniques

The Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) offers excellent imaging quality, but it has a comparatively small field of view. This means that while observing the solar photosphere, there has been no convenient way of calibrating the image scale of the telescope. Other telescopes, such as NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)utilize their larger Field of View (FOV) to use the solar disk as a reference in order to measure the image scale. In the past, the image scale of the SST has been determined by measuring the distance between the moons of Jupiter in a captured SST image and comparing it to reference values, as well as with the Venus transit of 2004. Both of these methods have their drawbacks, including needing to open the telescope at night or waiting for the very rare occurrence of a solar transit, which the telescope may not even be in a position to observe. Additionally, assessing the accuracy of these methods can be difficult. The purpose of this thesis is to examine the feasibility of an idea proposed by the faculty of the Institute for Solar Physics at Stockholm University, that would allow us to routinely calibrate the image scale of the SST when desired and with known accuracy of the measurement, without the need to open the telescope at night. The measurements performed so far are consistent with the old value to about one third of a percent, with a total uncertainty of the SST/CRISP image scale of about 0.1 percent. Resulting in a grid spacing of the pinhole array of 5.15 arcseconds, which can be used to determine the image scale of all the remaining science cameras of the SST.