CAMTRACKER

For greenhouse gas studies very stringent requirements on measurements quality came up a few years ago. To meet those error requirements the spectrometer has to be operated as well as possible AND the solar tracking has to be as accurate as possible. To improve tracking quality Michael Gisi and Frank Hase developed the new software CAMTRACKER.

CAMTRACKER comes with a CCD camera which is pointed directly on the aperture of the spectrometer. Therefore, an alignment of an extra optics to extract part of the solar beam is no longer needed and the corresponding error source is omitted.

CAMTRACKER fits two ellipses, one on the image of the sun and the other one on the image of the aperture. In a next step the mirrors are positioned in such a way that the inner ellipse is centered on the outer one. The tracking quality is significantly improved as compared to a quadrant detector design, see also:

Gisi, M., F. Hase, S. Dohe, and T. Blumenstock: Camtracker: a new camera controlled high precision solar tracker system for FTIR-spectrometers, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 4, 47-54, 2011.

If you’re interested to use CAMTRACKER please contact Frank Hase.