CONSORTIA/INSTITUTIONS
NSO/SP
The National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak, (village of Sunspot) lies in New Mexico at the southern end of NM Scenic Byway 6563. For more than half a century this location, high above Alamogordo, NM, has been known for its excellent daytime sky quality, both in terms of transparency and seeing. The Richard B. Dunn Solar Telescope (DST) takes advantage of these conditions to make high-resolution observations of the Sun. The DST is the finest instrument of its kind in the world. With 0.2 arc-seconds resolution, the DST has revealed many intricacies of the surface features on the Sun imposed by the complex magnetic fields that dominate that region. The DST is equipped with a wide range of excellent instrumentation, such as the Universal Birefringent Filter and Echelle Spectrograph. The DST has also served as the test bed for the ongoing development of the next generation of solar instrumentation. This new instrumentation includes adaptive optics systems that will greatly reduce the effects of seeing on the solar image. The superb sky quality at Sacramento Peak makes it an ideal spot to study the solar corona. [Summary provided by The National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak.]