The Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO) is a

solar observatory A solar observatory is an observatory that specializes in monitoring the Sun. As such, they usually have one or more solar telescopes. The Einstein Tower was a solar observatory in the Albert Einstein Science Park in Potsdam, Germany. Solar ...

Stanford, California Stanford is a census-designated place (CDP) in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States. It is the home of Stanford University. The population was 21,150 at the 2020 census. Stanford is an unincorporated area of ...

that is used to produce daily observations of the magnetic and

velocity field In continuum mechanics the flow velocity in fluid dynamics, also macroscopic velocity in statistical mechanics, or drift velocity in electromagnetism, is a vector field used to mathematically describe the motion of a continuum. The length of the f ...

at the Sun's surface. It began daily observations of the Sun's mean magnetic field in May 1975. Formerly known as the Stanford Solar Observatory, it is operated by Stanford University and is located south of the Stanford University campus. It would later be named after solar physicist

John M. Wilcox John Marsh Wilcox (1925 – October 14, 1983) was an American geophysicist. He worked at the University of California, Berkeley at the Space Sciences Laboratory from 1964 to 1971. He was an adjunct professor at Stanford University from 1971 unt ...

. WSO has historically been funded by NASA Heliophysics, the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National ...

, and the Office of Naval Research. WSO uses a Littrow spectrograph together with a Babcock magnetograph on the 5250 Å iron-1

spectral line A spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum, resulting from emission or absorption of light in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby frequencies. Spectral lines are often used to iden ...

, which it compares to the close by and magnetically insensitive iron-1 line at 5124 Å, to estimate the line-of-sight

photospheric The photosphere is a star's outer shell from which light is radiated. The term itself is derived from Ancient Greek roots, φῶς, φωτός/''phos, photos'' meaning "light" and σφαῖρα/''sphaira'' meaning "sphere", in reference to it ...

magnetic field to within 0.04

gauss Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss (; german: Gauß ; la, Carolus Fridericus Gauss; 30 April 177723 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to many fields in mathematics and science. Sometimes refer ...

.Magnetogram Chromosphere Observed from Wilcox Observatory
/ref>

References

External links

WSO - The Wilcox Solar Observatory
Astronomical observatories Solar telescopes {{Sun-stub