SOLARNET Conference: The Many Scales of the Magnetic Sun

To infer the physical conditions in the solar atmosphere, it is necessary to record not only the spatial distribution of the emerging radiation, but also its spectral and polarimetric properties. Traditionally, solar instrumentation has accomplished this by recording slices through the spatio-spectral domain, and scanning in the missing dimension. A Microlensed Hyperspectral Imager (MiHI) is an instrument that is able to observe a spatio-spectral cube instantaneously, thus eliminating the need to scan. This increases the photon efficiency of the observations, and with the aid of state of the art cameras allows for the acquisition of very high cadence data. Combined with image restoration, high resolution spectra with a spatial resolution close to the diffraction limit of the telescope can be obtained at a cadence of less than one second, in all four Stokes parameters. The talk covers the basic principle of operation, data extraction and restoration, and some examples of data recorded at the Swedish Solar Telescope.