Abstract
AbstractWe present the first comprehensive set of lunar exospheric line width and line width derived effective temperatures as a function of lunar phase (66° waxing phase to 79° waning phase). Data were collected between November 2013 and May 2014 during six observing runs at the National Solar Observatory McMath‐Pierce Solar Telescope by applying high‐resolution Fabry‐Perot spectroscopy (R ~ 180,000) to observe emission from exospheric sodium (5,889.9509 Å, D2 line). The 3‐arc min field of view of the instrument, corresponding to ~336 km at the mean lunar distance (384,400 km), was positioned at several locations off the lunar limb; only equatorial observations taken out to 950 km are presented here. We find the sodium effective temperature distribution to be approximately a symmetric function of lunar phase with respect to full Moon. Within magnetotail passage we find temperatures in the range of 2500–9000 K. For phase angles greater than 40° we find that temperatures flatten out to ~1700 K.
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