Properties of umbral dots from stray light corrected hinode filtergrams

Abstract

High-resolution blue continuum filtergrams from Hinode are employed to study the umbral fine structure of a regular unipolar sunspot. The removal of scattered light from the images increases the rms contrast by a factor of 1.45 on average. Improvement in image contrast renders identification of short filamentary structures resembling penumbrae that are well separated from the umbra–penumbra boundary and comprise bright filaments/grains flanking dark filaments. Such fine structures were recently detected from ground-based telescopes and have now been observed with Hinode. A multi-level tracking algorithm was used to identify umbral dots (UDs) in both the uncorrected and corrected images and to track them in time. The distribution of the values describing the photometric and geometric properties of UDs is more easily affected by the presence of stray light while it is less severe in the case of kinematic properties. Statistically, UDs exhibit a peak intensity, effective diameter, lifetime, horizontal speed, and a trajectory length of 0.29I/sub SQ/, 272 km, 8.4 minutes, 0.45 km s/sup-1/, and 221 km, respectively. The 2 hr 20 minute time sequence depicts several locations where UDs tend to appear and disappear repeatedly with various time intervals. The correction for scattered light in the Hinode filtergrams facilitates photometry of umbral fine structure, which can be related to results obtained from larger telescopes and numerical simulations.