Ms. V. Daskalopoulou , during a Virtual Mobility Grant of our Action, has developed a reference ecosystem for solar polarimetery , which is freely available.
Incoming solar radiation is considered unpolarized before it enters the Earth’s atmosphere.Throughout its propagation in the atmosphere polarization changes, through the absorption and scattering interactions with various atmospheric components including aerosol particles, water droplets,ice crystals and molecules. The transmitted (direct) sunlight is always unpolarized, except when it propagates through oriented particles in the atmosphere.Interpreting linear polarization measurements in the direct direction, i.e. measurements taken when the observer looks directly towards the illuminating object, can be challenging due to the overwhelming intensity of light and secondary sources of linear polarization in the observational line-of-sight.
SolPol (Solar Polarimeter) is an experimental ground-based solar polarimeter used for direct sunlight polarization measurements. It operates both under laboratory and field conditions depending on the application at hand and provides near real-time observations of the complete Stokes vector. The instrument was initially developed at the University of Hertfordshire (UH) and was used both in-lab and mounted on an astronomical telescope, so as to acquire both linear and circular polarization signatures. It was, after that, kindly conferred to the National Observatory of Athens (NOA) within the framework of the D-TECT project and operated on-demand from the PANGEA (PANhellenic GEophysical observatory of Antikythera) station.
The GitLab repository can be found here !
The Zenodo repository, where all SolPol data are collected, is here !
…and the final manual can be downloaded from here.