Studying the astroclimate at Baikal Astrophysical Observatory by optical methods

A technique is proposed for measuring astroclimate characteristics of the Baikal Astrophysical Observatory (BAO) by analysis of the quality of images obtained at a full Sun phase telescope. To estimate the image quality, a modified statistical information “optimal window” algorithm is used. Large amounts of information (thousands of frames) are processed automatically using a hardware-software complex developed at the Institute of Atmospheric Optics based on NVIDIA®CUDA parallel programming technologies and Intel® IPP and MKL libraries. Results of the statistical analysis of solar chromosphere filtergrams in the H-alpha line obtained at BAO during 2001–2002 using a Princeton Instruments 2048B digital camera are presented.