Abstract: An occulting assembly for use with a telescope or other imaging instrument when viewing the sun or other bright light source. An occulting disk is supported by a set of thin stiff truss rods. These truss rods are attached to the dark side of the adapter at one end and to an adapter at the other end. The adapter provides a mechanical interface to the telescope or other imaging instrument and has an aperture piece that defines an aperture in its center. The occulting disk is sized to completely shadow the aperture and the truss is arranged so that it is within the shadow of the occulting disk.

Abstract: A method and system for generating a compressed spectral image is provided. Spectral image data including a plurality of spectral intensity values is received. The spectral intensity values are associated with a first spatial dimension (x-dimension), a second spatial dimension (y-dimension) and a wavelength dimension (?-dimension). A window is applied to the spectral image data along the ?-dimension, to select a subset of the spectral image data corresponding to a range of wavelengths. A Fourier transform is performed on the windowed spectral image data along the ?-dimension, at locations along the x-dimension and y-dimension, to generate Fourier coefficients associated with each of the locations. The Fourier transformed data is filtered by retaining a subset of the Fourier coefficients at each of the locations. Wavelet compression is performed on the filtered data along the x-dimension and the y-dimension to generate the compressed spectral image.