Wednesday, 11/04/09 Achievements of the EAST & ATST Workshop

From the 14th to the 16th of October, about 90 solar physicists representing 15 nations came together to debate nothing less than the future of solar physics. Quite possibly, research of our sun is treading into a new phase: in recent years new possibilities to observe the sun have emerged or are being planned the world over. Therefore, both those solar physicists who are working on the development of new instruments as well as those who are eagerly awaiting new data with which to test their theories and simulations met in the lecture hall of the physics department at the invitation of the Kiepenheuer-Institut für Sonnenphysik.

It was generally agreed that the behavior of the solar magne

Thursday, 11/19/09 The SUNRISE telescope delivers spectacular pictures of the Sun's surface

Between June 8 and 15, 2009, the balloon-borne solar telescope SUNRISE successfully completed its first high-altitude flight from Kiruna in northern Sweden to Somerset Island in northern Canada. During that time it took many thousands of images in the ultraviolet and visible part of the solar spectrum.

The KIS contributed SUNRISE's image stabilization and focusing unit, a crucial part in observing and measuring the Sun's small-scale magnetic field with unprecedented detail and accuracy. The data analysis will take a significant amount of time, but preliminary results show that SUNRISE data will provide valuable contributions to our understanding of the Sun and its magnetic activity.

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