Chlöe Swarbrick’s Auckland Central Victory

In the 2020 election, Chlöe Swarbrick won the Green party’s second-ever electorate seat, in Auckland Central. A high-profile candidate, an experienced campaign team, some favourable conditions, and mass engagement enabled Swarbrick to build a winning coalition. For socialists, who are returning to electoral politics throughout liberal democracies, the skills required to win electoral campaigns are key. With an emphasis on ‘building a community, not an army’, the Swarbrick campaign offers useful lessons in how to build and sustain political engagement. With a more explicitly socialist political agenda and a stronger organising theory of change, election campaigns could provide a spark for a left political movement in Aotearoa New Zealand

An Atlas of Coronal Electron Density at 5R⊙, II:A Spherical Harmonic Method for Density Reconstruction

This is the second of a series of three papers that present a methodology with the aim of creating a set of maps of the coronal density over a period of many years. This paper describes a method for reconstructing the coronal electron density based on spherical harmonics. By assuming a radial structure to the corona at the height of interest, line-of-sight integrations can be made individually on each harmonic basis prior to determining coefficients, i.e. the computationally-expensive integrations are calculated only once during initialization. This approach reduces the problem to finding the set of coefficients which best match the observed brightness using a regularized least-squares approach, and is very efficient. The method is demonstrated on synthetic data created from both a simple and an intricate coronal density model. The quality of reconstruction is found to be reasonable in the presence of noise and large gaps in the data. The method is applied to both LASCO C2 and STEREO COR2 coronagraph observations from 2009/03/20, and the results from both spacecraft compared. Future work will apply the method to large datasets

An Atlas of Coronal Electron Density at 5R⊙, I:Data Processing and Calibration

Tomography of the solar corona can provide cruicial constraints for models of the low corona, unique information on changes in coronal structure and rotation rates, and a valuable boundary condition for models of the heliospheric solar wind. This is the first of a series of three papers which aim to create a set of maps of the coronal density over an extended period (1996-present). The papers will describe the data processing and calibration (this paper), the tomography method (\paperii) and resulting atlas of coronal electron density at a height of 5\Rs\ between years 1996-2014 (\paperiii). This first paper presents a detailed description of data processing and calibration for the Large-Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) C2 instrument onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the COR2 instruments of the Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) package aboard the Solar Terrestial Relations Observatory (STEREO) A \& B spacecraft. The methodology includes noise suppression, background subtraction, separation of large dynamic events, conversion of total brightness to K-coronal brightness and simple functions for crosscalibration between C2/LASCO and COR2/SECCHI. Comparison of the brightness of stars between LASCO C2 total and polarized brightness (\pB) observations provide in-flight calibration factors for the \pB\ observations, resulting in considerable improved agreement between C2 and COR2 A, and elimination of curious artifacts in the C2 \pB\ images. The crosscalibration between LASCO C2 and the STEREO coronagraphs allows, for the first time, the potential use of multi-spacecraft coronagraph data for tomography and for CME analysis.Comment: 50 pages, 28 figure