Tomography of the Solar Corona. II. Robust, Regularized, Positive Estimation of the Three-dimensional Electron Density Distribution from LASCO-C2 Polarized White-Light Images

Solar rotational tomography is used to determine the three-dimensional electron density distribution of the solar corona from 2.4 to 6.0 R☉. The robust, regularized, positive estimation method, described in a previous paper, is demonstrated on test cases and on LASCO-C2 data. Because the solar rotational pole is inclined to the plane of the ecliptic by about 7°, the tomographic inversion requires a full three-dimensional treatment instead of a series of two-dimensional inversions. The LASCO data are taken from the first Whole Sun Month, which was a period of low solar activity.

[1]  R. Frazin Tomography of the Solar Corona. I. A Robust, Regularized, Positive Estimation Method , 2000 .

[2]  Gabor T. Herman,et al.  Image reconstruction from projections : implementation and applications , 1979 .

[3]  A. Vourlidas,et al.  Deriving the Electron Density of the Solar Corona from the Inversion of Total Brightness Measurements , 2001 .

[4]  M. Altschuler Reconstruction of the global-scale three-dimensional solar corona , 1979 .

[5]  William H. Press,et al.  Numerical Recipes: FORTRAN , 1988 .

[6]  Dianne P. O'Leary,et al.  The Use of the L-Curve in the Regularization of Discrete Ill-Posed Problems , 1993, SIAM J. Sci. Comput..

[7]  Donald E. Billings,et al.  A Guide to the Solar Corona , 2013 .

[8]  Alexander V. Panasyuk,et al.  Three‐dimensional reconstruction of UV emissivities in the solar corona using Ultraviolet Coronagraph Spectrometer data from the Whole Sun Month , 1999 .

[9]  Jeffrey A. Fessler,et al.  Grouped coordinate descent algorithms for robust edge-preserving image restoration , 1997, Optics & Photonics.

[10]  R. Michael Perry,et al.  On determining the electron density distribution of the solar corona from K-coronameter data , 1972 .

[11]  S. Fineschi,et al.  An Empirical Model of a Polar Coronal Hole at Solar Minimum , 1999 .

[12]  D. Biesecker,et al.  Solar minimum streamer densities and temperatures using Whole Sun Month coordinated data sets , 1999 .

[13]  Gene H. Golub,et al.  Matrix computations , 1983 .

[14]  P. Lamy,et al.  The Large Angle Spectroscopic Coronagraph (LASCO) , 1995 .

[15]  D. Dobrzycka,et al.  Comparison of Polar and Equatorial Coronal Holes Observed by UVCS/SOHO: Geometry and Physical Properties , 1999 .