| flash spectrum ...photography by Robert B Slobins |
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Image Reference: 2009-901-00 |
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Corona without pollution, Chongqing - China 22 July 2009
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A clear sky is not necessary, but a uniform sky cover is. So Chongqing's smog was not as serious a problem as cloud patches would have been. .
I had one complete series of usable exposures. I did not have the time to generate duplicate series. Cameras have limited buffer space and writing images to storage consumes valuable time. Also, the latter half of totality was clearer than the first. That reduced the signal to noise ratio.
Still, Dr Druckmuller was able to get rid of the pollution to reveal a fully detailed and respectable image. To my knowledge, this is the only image set from China, and if you go to his website, for which I provided a link, you can see the differences between my corona and his over the space of about three hours.
This is an example of the corona of the very quiet sun in an extended minimum. The solar magnetic field was extremely weak with depressed magnetic flux from the equatorial regions. This allows local magnetic sources to affect the coronal configuration. These sources show up as complex multipolar structures and short irregular streamers within the inner corona, perhaps heralding the start of a new solar cycle.