Automatic Solar Seeing Observations at Mt. Wumingshan in Western China

Abstract

Mountain Wumingshan (Mt. WMS) is located in the southeastern foot of the Tibet Plateau with an altitude of 4,800 m. It is one of the candidate sites to place China’s next-generation large-scale solar telescope. A temporary observation platform has been built at Mt. WMS, but there is still a great need of a stable solar-seeing monitoring for long-term observations. Based on the preliminary studies on the Solar Differential Image Motion Monitor (SDIMM) of the Yunnan Observatories, we built an improved version of this early prototype, which is called Wumingshan Mountain Automated Solar Differential Image Motion Monitor (WMA-SDIMM). We develop the automatic system of the WMA-SDIMM, investigate the reliability and precision of our measurements by error analysis and comparison testing, and present the statistical results from October 2016 to September 2017 at Mt. WMS. WMA-SDIMM works very well at Mt. WMS and is quite suitable for long-period daytime seeing observations.