Heidelberg Joint Astronomical Colloquium

Gregor is a new telescope for observing the Sun which has recently been completed at the Teide Observatory on Tenerife, Spain. Gregor has been built by an international consortium under the leadership of the German solar community with significant contributions from the Spanish and Czech solar communities. Gregor is now in a technical commissioning phase and science verification observing will carried out through the end of 2012.

With an aperture of 1.5m, Gregor is the largest European solar telescope and will be among the largest solar telescopes worldwide, at least for the next decade. The main scientific goal of Gregor is to make key observations of the Sun's surface magnetism, which are crucial to understand the generation, transformation and dissipation of magnetic fields in an active star. These observations require high resolution and sensitivity to measure the polarized intensity in space, time, and spectral dimensions. For first light, Gregor features three post focus instruments for the visible and near-infrared spectral regimes and a high-order solar adaptive optics system. A multi-conjugate adaptive optics system is being tested in the laboratory and will be moved to the telescope in 2012.

This talk will present the current state of Gregor and its science commissioning plan.