Applying speckle masking to spectra

We have applied the technique of speckle masking to spectra. The observatio n of elongated solar structures avoids the problem of missing information i n one-dimensional spectra. Image motion perpendicular to the slit was dimin ished by a one-dimensional image stabilization system. The remaining influe nce of the Earth's atmosphere was removed by a modified speckle-masking alg orithm, adapted to the single spatial dimension occurring in the spectra. T he reconstructed spectra achieve the diffraction limit of the telescope and the spectrograph. The first application of this technique to observations of spicules and pen umbral filaments reveals more details and also yield line profiles which di ffer from those before reconstruction. The H alpha emission in spicules sho ws line-of-sight velocities two times larger than in the unprocessed spectr a. The non-magnetic line Fe 709.03 nm shows penumbral line widths. reflecti ng mostly the line asymmetry from the Evershed effect, which are tightly co rrelated to the continuum intensity fluctuations. Our reconstruction increa ses the coherence between both from 0.6 to 0.8.