HMI is an instrument designed to study oscillations and the magnetic field at the solar surface, or photosphere. HMI is one of three instruments on the Solar Dynamics Observatory; together, the suite of instruments observes the Sun nearly continuously and takes a terabyte of data a day. HMI observes the full solar disk at 6173 Å with a resolution of 1 arcsecond. HMI is a successor to the Michelson Doppler Imager on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. HMI consists of a refracting telescope, a polarization selector, an image stabilization system, a narrow band tunable filter and two 4096 pixel CCD cameras with mechanical shutters and control electronics. Images are made in a sequence of tuning and polarizations at a 4-second cadence for each camera. One camera is dedicated to a 45s Doppler and line-of-sight field sequence while the other to a 90s vector field sequence.
