The National Large Solar Telescope (NLST)is a Gregorian multi-purpose open telescope proposed to be built in Merak village in Ladakh in India and aims to study the sun's microscopic structure.

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics

Indian Institute of Astrophysics

The Indian Institute of Astrophysics , with its headquarters in Bangalore , India, is a premier national institute of India for the study of and research into topics pertaining to astronomy, astrophysics and related subjects....

 is the nodal agency charged with various scientific bodies like the Indian Space Research Organisation

Indian Space Research Organisation

The Indian Space Research Organisation is an independent Indian governmental agency established in 1969 for the research and development of vehicles and activities for the exploration of space within and outside of Earth’s atmosphere. Headquartered in Bangalore...

 (ISRO), Aryabhatta Research Institute of Observational-Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

Tata Institute of Fundamental Research

The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research is a research institution in India dedicated to basic research in mathematics and the sciences. It is a Deemed University and works under the umbrella of the Department of Atomic Energy of the Government of India. It is located at Navy Nagar, Colaba, Mumbai...

 (TIFR) and Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics

Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics

The Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics is an autonomous institution set up by the University Grants Commission to promote nucleation and growth of active groups in astronomy and astrophysics in Indian universities...

 (IUCAA) also participating.

Location

The proposed site for the location of the telescope is the Merak Village in the Ladakh

Ladakh

Ladakh is a region of Jammu and Kashmir, the northernmost state of the Republic of India. It lies between the Kunlun mountain range in the north and the main Great Himalayas to the south, inhabited by people of Indo-Aryan and Tibetan descent...

 region in Jammu and Kashmir

Jammu and Kashmir

Jammu and Kashmir is the northernmost state of India. It is situated mostly in the Himalayan mountains. Jammu and Kashmir shares a border with the states of Himachal Pradesh and Punjab to the south and internationally with the People's Republic of China to the north and east and the...

 in India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

. The village is near Pangong Lake

Pangong Tso

Pangong Tso is an endorheic lake in the Himalayas situated at a height of about . It is long and extends from India to Tibet. 60% of the length of the lake lies in China. The lake is wide at its broadest point...

.

Telescope

NLST is proposed to be on-axis alt-azimuth Gregorian

Gregorian telescope

The Gregorian telescope is a type of reflecting telescope designed by Scottish mathematician and astronomer James Gregory in the 17th century, and first built in 1673 by Robert Hooke...

multi-purpose open telescope with the provision of carrying out night time stellar observations using a spectrograph. It hopes to resolve features on the Sun of the size of about 0.1 arcsec. The focal plane instruments are to include a high resolu-tion polarimeteric package to measure polarization with an accuracy of 0.01 per cent; a high spectral resolution spectrograph to obtain spectra in 5 widely separated absorption lines simultaneously and high spatial resolution narrow band imagers in various lines.