The Marshall Space Flight Center Vector Magnetograph Facility was assembled in 1973 to support the Skylab mission. The instrument was designed by Dr. Guenther Brueckner of the Naval Research Laboratory and housed in an enclosure at the top of a 40-foot tower. Improvements to the vector magnetograph in 1976 by Solar Physics Branch member Ed West, produced a world-class instrument that has illustrated the usefulness of reliable vector magnetic field measurements for understanding solar magnetism and its role in processes such as solar flares.

The facility added a co-aligned H-alpha telescope in 1989. This instrument was built as a backup for an H-alpha telescope which flew on Skylab's Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM); it has a bandpass of 1 Å.

Images from this telescope provide a view of chromospheric structures, flare activity, and additional information on the orientation of the magnetic field in active regions. This photograph of the magnetograph shows the gold plated H-alpha telescope mounted on the side of the magnetograph telescope. James Smith (retired), former chief observer, is shown attending to the instrument.

To take advantage of more up-to-date technology, the magnetograph was again upgraded in 1999/2000. The upgrade consisted of installing a new CCD camera and data acquisition system. With the new CCD, the spatial resolution over the 6 x 6 arcmin field of view was increased to 0.64 arcsec per pixel (binning 1 x 1), an improvement by a factor of 5 over the former detector. The new system is also faster (3 minutes for a full vector magnetogram) and much more versatile with its new computer system and much larger memory. We began observations with this system on September 14, 2000.