White light coronal structures and flattening during six total solar eclipses

Abstract

Solar corona is very important part of the solar atmosphere, which is not available every time and it is very difficult to observe it. From solar corona we can get more information about outer sun layers. Large-scale structure of the solar corona can be studied during total solar eclipses.The structure, shape and brightness of the solar corona significantly change from eclipse to eclipse. They depend on activity of the sun. At maximum solar activity, the corona is very bright and uniform around the solar limb. There are a lot of bright coronal streamers and other active regions on it. During minimum of solar activity the solar corona stretches at the equator and become elliptical.Flattening index is the first quantitative parameter introduced for analyses of the global structure of the solar corona. It varies with respect to the phase of the solar activity and sunspot number. In this paper we study the solar corona during the 1990, 1999, 2006, 2008, 2009 and 2012 total solar eclipses. We obtain flattening coefficients for all the six eclipses by using a new computer program. Our results are in a good agreement with published results.