Stray-light restoration of full-disk CaII K solar observations: a case study

INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, via Frascati 33, 00040 Monte Porzio Catone, Italy e-mail: criscuoli@oaroma.inaf.it

Received: 9 November 2007
Accepted: 21 February 2008

Abstract

Aims. We investigate whether restoration techniques, such as those developed for application to current observations, can be used to remove stray-light degradation effects on archive CaII K full-disk observations. We analyze to what extent these techniques can recover homogeneous time series of data.

Methods. We develop a restoration algorithm based on a method presented by Walton & Preminger (1999, ApJ, 514, 959). We apply this algorithm to data for both present-day and archive CaII K full-disk observations, which were acquired using the PSPT mounted at the Rome Observatory, or obtained by digitization of Mt Wilson photographic-archive spectroheliograms.

Results. We show that the restoring algorithm improves both spatial resolution and photometric contrast of the analyzed solar observations. We find that the improvement in spatial resolution is similar for analyzed recent and archive data. On the other hand, the improvement of photometric contrast is quite poor for the archive data, with respect to the one obtained for the present-day images. We show that the quality of restored archive data depends on the photographic calibration applied to the original observations. In particular, photometry can be recovered with a restoring algorithm if the photographic-calibration preserves the intensity information stored in the original data, principally outside the solar-disk observations.