Correction of atmospheric stray light in restored slit spectra

Abstract

Context. A long-standing issue in solar ground-based observations has been the contamination of data due to stray light, which is particularly relevant in inversions of spectropolarimetric data. Aims. We aim to build on a statistical method of correcting stray-light contamination due to residual high-order aberrations and apply it to ground-based slit spectra. Methods. The observations were obtained at the Swedish Solar Telescope, and restored using the multi-frame blind deconvolution restoration procedure. Using the statistical properties of seeing, we created artificially degraded synthetic images generated from magneto-hydrodynamic simulations. We then compared the synthetic data with the observations to derive estimates of the amount of the residual stray light in the observations. In the final step, the slit spectra were deconvolved with a stray-light point spread function to remove the residual stray light from the observations. Results. The RMS granulation contrasts of the deconvolved spectra were found to increase to approximately 12.5%, from 9%. Spectral lines, on average, were found to become deeper in the granules and shallower in the inter-granular lanes, indicating systematic changes to gradients in temperature. The deconvolution was also found to increase the redshifts and blueshifts of spectral lines, suggesting that the velocities of granulation in the solar photosphere are higher than had previously been observed.