Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
The 1.6-m New Solar Telescope (NST) has been used to observe the Sun for more than three years with ever increasing capabilities as its commissioning phase winds down. The NST is the first facility-class solar telescope built in the U.S. in a generation, and it has an off-axis design as is planned for the 4 m Advanced Technology Solar Telescope. Lessons learned will be discussed. Current NST post-focus instrumentation includes adaptive optics (AO) feeding photometric and near-IR polarimetric sytems, as well as an imaging spectrograph. On-going instrumentation projects will be sketched, including Multi-Conjugate AO (MCAO), next generation (dual Fabry- Perot) visible light and near-IR polarimeters and a fully cryogenic spectrograph. Finally, recent observational results illustrating the high resolution capabilities of the NST will be shown.
Goode et al. (Mon,) studied this question.