Time-Dependent Tomographic Reconstruction of the Solar Corona

Solar rotational tomography (SRT) applied to white-light coronal images observed at multiple aspect angles has been the preferred approach for determining the three-dimensional (3D) electron density structure of the solar corona. However, it is seriously hampered by the restrictive assumption that the corona is time-invariant which introduces significant errors in the reconstruction. We first explore several methods to mitigate the temporal variation of the corona by decoupling the "fast-varying" inner corona from the "slow-moving" outer corona using multiple masking (either by juxtaposition or recursive combination) and radial weighting. Weighting with a radial exponential profile provides some improvement over a classical reconstruction but only beyond 3 Rsun. We next consider a full time-dependent tomographic reconstruction involving spatio-temporal regularization and further introduce a co-rotating regularization aimed at preventing concentration of reconstructed density in the plane of the sky. Crucial to testing our procedure and properly tuning the regularization parameters is the introduction of a time-dependent MHD model of the corona based on observed magnetograms to build a time-series of synthetic images of the corona. Our procedure, which successfully reproduces the time-varying model corona, is finally applied to a set of of 53 LASCO-C2 pB images roughly evenly spaced in time from 15 to 29 March 2009. Our procedure paves the way to a time-dependent tomographic reconstruction of the coronal electron density to the whole set of LASCO-C2 images presently spanning 20 years.Comment: 24 pages, 18 figure

EIT Reconstruction Algorithms: Pitfalls, Challenges and Recent Developments

We review developments, issues and challenges in Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT), for the 4th Workshop on Biomedical Applications of EIT, Manchester 2003. We focus on the necessity for three dimensional data collection and reconstruction, efficient solution of the forward problem and present and future reconstruction algorithms. We also suggest common pitfalls or ``inverse crimes'' to avoid.Comment: A review paper for the 4th Workshop on Biomedical Applications of EIT, Manchester, UK, 200