Italian panoramic monochromator for the THEMIS telescope: the first results and instrument evaluation

We briefly describe the design and the characteristics of the Italian Panoramic Monochromator installed at the focal plane of the THEMIS telescope built in Izana by a joint venture of the French and Italian National Research Councils. The Panoramic Monochromator substantially is a narrow band filter (approximate to 22 m Angstrom bandwidth) tunable on the visible spectrum for quasi simultaneous bidimensional spectrometry of the solar atmosphere. The narrow bandwidth is obtained by using a non standard birefringent filter and a Fabry Perot interferometer mounted in series. This assembly has the advantage of the spectral purity of one channel of the Fabry Perot interferometer and a very large free spectral range. Moreover the spectral stability depends on the interferometer, the environment of which may be carefully controlled. The design of this instrument is not really new, but, only now it has been possible to build it thanks to the development of servo controlled Fabry Perot interferometers, which are stable in time and may easily be tuned. The system seems to perform well. It is stable in wavelength and the spectral pass band and stray light are within the expected values, as it may be deduced by very preliminary tests performed at the THEMIS Telescope and in Arcetri (Firenze) at the "G.B. Donati" solar tower.