Performance of the Savart-plate polarimeter on the Pomona College 1-meter telescope at Table Mountain
Abstract
The one-meter telescope belonging to Pomona College located at the Table Mountain facility operated by JPL is equipped with an Apogee Instruments U16 CCD camera and several filters, including a Savart plate and rotatable half-wave plate for doing imaging polarimetry. Several nights of telescope time during the summers of 2011 and 2012 were devoted to testing the reliability and sensitivity of the polarimeter. In general, results with the one-meter telescope are in agreement with published polarizations of both polarimetric standards and several blazars but some peculiarities of the instrument, most notably a systematic non-zero difference in brightness between the two images, remain to be explained.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #221
- Pub Date:
- January 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013AAS...22134527Z