The First Stray Light Corrected EUV Images of Solar Coronal Holes

TL;DR

This paper presents the first in-flight stray light correction for EUV images of solar coronal holes, significantly improving the accuracy of temperature and density diagnostics crucial for understanding solar wind origins.

Contribution

The authors developed a constrained blind deconvolution method using lunar transit data to remove stray light from EUV images, enabling more accurate solar coronal measurements.

Findings

Stray light accounts for up to 70% of emission in coronal holes.

Corrected images improve plasma parameter estimates.

Method enhances the reliability of solar corona diagnostics.

Abstract

Coronal holes are the source regions of the fast solar wind, which fills most of the solar system volume near the cycle minimum. Removing stray light from extreme ultraviolet (EUV) images of the Sun's corona is of high astrophysical importance, as it is required to make meaningful determinations of temperatures and densities of coronal holes. EUV images tend to be dominated by the component of the stray light due to the long-range scatter caused by microroughness of telescope mirror surfaces, and this component has proven very difficult to measure in pre-flight characterization. In-flight characterization heretofore has proven elusive due to the fact that the detected image is simultaneously nonlinear in two unknown functions: the stray light pattern and the true image which would be seen by an ideal telescope. Using a constrained blind deconvolution technique that takes advantage of known zeros in the true image provided by a fortuitous lunar transit, we have removed the stray light from solar images seen by the EUVI instrument on STEREO-B in all four filter bands (171, 195, 284, and 304 \AA). Uncertainty measures of the stray light corrected images, which include the systematic error due to misestimation of the scatter, are provided. It is shown that in EUVI, stray light contributes up to 70% of the emission in coronal holes seen on the solar disk, which has dramatic consequences for diagnostics of temperature and density and therefore estimates of key plasma parameters such as the plasma $\beta$\ and ion-electron collision rates.