Deriving the electron density of the solar corona from the inversion of total brightness measurements

Usually, the electron density structure of the white-light solar corona is estimated from the inversion of polarized brightness measurements. The inve rsion technique was developed in the 1950s and has remained largely unchang ed since. Here, for the first time, we expand this technique to total brigh tness observations to take advantage of the extensive Large Angle and Spect rometric Coronagraphs (LASCO) archive. We compare our technique to both the oretical coronal models and actual observations and show that it is as robu st and accurate as the widely used polarized brightness inversion. The quan titative analysis of white-light coronal data critically depends on the rem oval of the F corona. We briefly describe an improved F corona model we der ived using the LASCO time series data.