2D and 3D Polar Plume Analysis from the Three Vantage Positions of STEREO/EUVI A, B, and SOHO/EIT

TL;DR

This paper presents a new automated method for identifying and analyzing the 3D structure of polar plumes in solar EUV images using data from STEREO and SOHO spacecraft, combining tomography and stereoscopy techniques.

Contribution

It introduces a multiscale Hough-wavelet based approach for plume detection and compares tomography and stereoscopy for 3D reconstruction of solar polar plumes.

Findings

Effective automatic plume identification near the solar limb.

Complementary use of tomography and stereoscopy for 3D analysis.

Insights into plume positions and cross-sectional areas.

Abstract

Polar plumes are seen as elongated objects starting at the solar polar regions. Here, we analyze these objects from a sequence of images taken simultaneously by the three spacecraft telescopes STEREO/EUVI A and B, and SOHO/EIT. We establish a method capable of automatically identifying plumes in solar EUV images close to the limb at 1.01 - 1.39 R in order to study their temporal evolution. This plume-identification method is based on a multiscale Hough-wavelet analysis. Then two methods to determined their 3D localization and structure are discussed: First, tomography using the filtered back-projection and including the differential rotation of the Sun and, secondly, conventional stereoscopic triangulation. We show that tomography and stereoscopy are complementary to study polar plumes. We also show that this systematic 2D identification and the proposed methods of 3D reconstruction are well suited, on one hand, to identify plumes individually and on the other hand, to analyze the distribution of plumes and inter-plume regions. Finally, the results are discussed focusing on the plume position with their cross-section area.