The IAG Solar Flux Atlas: Telluric Correction with a Semiempirical Model

Abstract

Observations of the Sun as a star have been key to guiding models of stellar atmospheres and additionally provide useful insights on the effects of granulation and stellar activity on radial velocity measurements. Most high-resolution solar atlases contain telluric lines that span the optical and limit the spectral regions useful for analysis. We present here a telluric-corrected solar atlas covering 0.5–1.0  μ m derived from solar spectra taken with a Fourier transform spectrograph at the Institut für Astrophysik, Göttingen. This atlas is the highest-resolution spectrum with a wavelength calibration precise to ±10 m s −1 across this 500 nm spectral window. We find that the atlas matches to within 3% of the telluric-corrected Kitt Peak atlas in regions containing telluric absorption weaker than 50% in transmission. The telluric component of the spectral data is fit with a semiempirical model composed of Lorentz profiles initialized to the High-resolution Transmission Molecular Absorption Database (HITRAN) parameters for each absorption feature. Comparisons between the best-fit telluric parameters describing the Lorentz profile for each absorption feature and the original HITRAN values in general show excellent agreement considering the effects atmospheric pressure and temperature have on our final parameters. However, we identify a small subset of absorption features with larger offsets relative to the cataloged line parameters. We make our final solar atlas available online. We additionally make available the telluric spectra extracted from the data that, given the high resolution of the spectrum, would be useful for studying the time evolution of telluric line shapes and their impact on Doppler measurements.