High-Cadence Imaging and Imaging Spectroscopy at the GREGOR Solar Telescope - A Collaborative Research Environment for High-Resolution Solar Physics

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of data collection, management, and collaborative research tools for high-resolution solar observations at the GREGOR Solar Telescope, addressing big data challenges in solar physics research.

Contribution

It introduces tailored data workflows and a Collaborative Research Environment for high-cadence imaging and spectroscopy data from GREGOR, enhancing data sharing and analysis capabilities.

Findings

Successful implementation of data processing pipelines for GFPI and HiFI instruments

Establishment of a community-accessible data archive and collaborative platform

Addressing big data challenges in high-resolution solar physics

Abstract

In high-resolution solar physics, the volume and complexity of photometric, spectroscopic, and polarimetric ground-based data significantly increased in the last decade reaching data acquisition rates of terabytes per hour. This is driven by the desire to capture fast processes on the Sun and by the necessity for short exposure times "freezing" the atmospheric seeing, thus enabling post-facto image restoration. Consequently, large-format and high-cadence detectors are nowadays used in solar observations to facilitate image restoration. Based on our experience during the "early science" phase with the 1.5-meter GREGOR solar telescope (2014-2015) and the subsequent transition to routine observations in 2016, we describe data collection and data management tailored towards image restoration and imaging spectroscopy. We outline our approaches regarding data processing, analysis, and archiving for two of GREGOR's post-focus instruments (see http://gregor.aip.de), i.e., the GREGOR Fabry-Perot Interferometer (GFPI) and the newly installed High-Resolution Fast Imager (HiFI). The heterogeneous and complex nature of multi-dimensional data arising from high-resolution solar observations provides an intriguing but also a challenging example for "big data" in astronomy. The big data challenge has two aspects: (1) establishing a workflow for publishing the data for the whole community and beyond and (2) creating a Collaborative Research Environment (CRE), where computationally intense data and post-processing tools are co-located and collaborative work is enabled for scientists of multiple institutes. This requires either collaboration with a data center or frameworks and databases capable of dealing with huge data sets based on Virtual Observatory (VO) and other community standards and procedures.